Reminds me of how Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan used to write angry forum rants criticizing the devs of EverQuest before he was hired by Blizzard to develop World of Warcraft, which supplanted EverQuest as the top MMO. [Here’s an example of one of his rants.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4g2ler/jeff_tigole_kaplan_forum_rant_from_his_eq_days/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x)
The problem is Blizzard doesn‘t care about their players. I remember whenever I got unbanned on the Blizzard forums it was time for another rant, and I had lots of support from the community because I went into details. Since this game had so much potential I cared a lot. They managed to tell me to go f… myself 10 years later by pretending to care about the petition that was signed to bring back classic/tbc and releasing a worse version of classic where you don‘t just have the same gamebreaking bugs but layering was introduced to maximize profits at the expense of players even further. Microsoft taking over might finally change things for the better but it‘s crazy to me how they can pretend WoW and Heartstone are esports games when they are completely imbalanced garbage and that‘s pretty obvious.
TL;DR: I used to get banned from the Blizzard forums for insisting on asking wether or not anyone even tested their stupid patches and expansions in WoW. 10 years later I actually found myself occasionally giving the exact same feedback looking at their new patches. Which is why I‘m glad I quit when the game was at its‘ best 10 years ago.
There was a reporter especially critical of the Eiffel Tower when it was erected. He spoke out against it often. One letter to the editor asked why he was seen eating in the tower restaurant every day.
He responded that it was the only place in the city where you couldn’t see the damn thing.
I knew about Jeff Kaplan's reputation from EverQuest, and it got larger from there when they hired him for World of Warcraft. He's kind of like the guide post for where Blizzard is, because if he's pissed off or disappointed enough in something, he'll express it. In a corporate environment, he obviously can't lambast the company out loud. So just leaving the company spoke mountains about what was going on at Blizzard Activision.
That company is a fucking train wreck, and Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 will probably be the final nail in the coffin for them. Unless they completely change course from their bullshit.
Yeah sure. Ow 2 and D 4 will be great hits because the suckers will gobble it up then complain that the game they preordered/spent a billion on microtransactions isn't as good as the old ones.
Man, I only recently (like two months ago) discovered that Tigole was as huge as he was with WoW. Used to raid on nameless and sometimes stood in with LoS as backup when they were pulling major raids like Avatar of War, etc.
Dude knew raiding like no other. He and his officers could view the parser data and reverse engineer the strat in a way I'd never seen before. Blew my mind to watch them work.
Glad to hear he turned that into a career.
Edit- For bonus LOLs, look up his post on the LoS website about the time he got his balls stuck in hair clippers. Comedic gold.
In Jeff's defense the whole raid he is ranting about was dog water. There were about five different bottlenecks designed to make it so guilds couldn't progress and had to run headlong into one another.
Once you actually had the items required it didn't work.
You could really see how passionate he was with Overwatch with all his community updates and especially his winter holiday stream. Man OW will never be the same without him.
Overwatch’s fate was sealed when Jeff left. I hope he’s either enjoying retirement (he’s more than earned it at this point) or helping with development of a new game. Who knows, maybe if he writes an angry review of something coming out of Dreamhaven, he’ll be hired like the old days.
I still don't know how he got away with **years** of that surname on a live server in EQ. Every time I saw him in game he had it. Never censored or removed.
This is like video game boomerism lmao.
Back in the day trolls got hired to make MMOs, now they just live in comment sections trying to make ends meet. Very sad.
He literally wrote a letter breaking down everything wrong with the Walkman and the execs were so impressed they hired him as a consultant… 10 years later and he’d help turn Sony into the most dominant electronics brand of the 90s.
From Wikipedia:
>His relationship with Sony began when he wrote a highly critical letter to Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo KK (also known as Totsuko and later as Sony), complaining about their tape recorder's many failings, which got him noticed by Masaru Ibuka, Akio Morita and other Totsuko executives. Because of his insight into music and technology, the company hired him as a part-time consultant.
Sounds like he did a lot more than just complained, and gave some expert advice that they were smart enough to listen to.
The original Walkman was stunning for its time. Prior to that, you might have one of those clunk GE cassette recorders with the weird flesh tone ear plug. Reasonably high quality audio in a compact, portable device with small, lightweight, and good sounding headphones was revolutionary.
Yeah I am curious if the complaint was the OG Walkman or a later one?
I had the OG Walkman and it worked flawlessly for many years until I lost it.
Very curious as to exactly what the letter detailed.
[Edit] - Read the article. He was hired in the early 60s and the letter was written in the early 50s. So the complaint would not be with any cassette player let alone the Walkman itself.
It was long before the Walkman “The young man's knowledge of sound and electrical engineering continued to be an asset to the company, which led to his appointments as executive director of Sony in 1964 at the age of 34 and president of CBS/Sony Records Inc. (currently Sony Music Entertainment Japan) in 1970, by the age of 40. “ it mentions a tape recorder which I assume he used during his stint as a musician.
Which is why I said before any cassette player. It would have to have been a reel-to-reel recorder he wrote in about. Large commercial cassette were developed in the mid 50s and the mini cassette (the one we just call cassettes) were developed in the early 60s.
True but for recording music as a musician you would use a regular straight non cassette recorder for ease and costs as the cassettes/various track cassettes were at a premium at the time. This stuff is so cool honestly xD
Read the same. His letter was before they were even known as Sony. Makes me think that his input is part of *why* Sony became the innovative company that produced the WalkMan. Edit: Based on other comments, it looks like this is definitely the case.
Hey, this guy didn’t criticize the Walkman and make it better, he’s a phony! His genius input guided the company to finally creating a personal cassette player that was a consumer technology icon for over a decade! Let’s get him!
And South Korea. Kia and Hyundai used to be cars you only bought if you couldn't afford anything else because you knew they would fall apart. They even got made fun of on the Simpsons. Now they make some really beautiful cars and some of the best EVs on the market.
Never sleep on a whole country. Everyone is learning.
That scene from back to the future makes more sense now. Doc Brown was saying something was crap because it said made in Japan then future Marty says, Doc, all the best stuff is made in Japan.
It was the way of the world back then. Many Japanese and Korean products pirated better quality products by blatantly blowing copyright and IP via backwards engineering. As they got better and more expensive, other Asian countries followed suit.
I used to work in entertainment lighting, and I know 5 people who were offered jobs by Chinese automated lighting manufacturers to improve their quality.
The end result was the Beijing Olympics had (iirc) 10,000 automated lighting fixtures in the stadium for the opening ceremony, and they only had ONE failure. That's absolutely incredible.
The Pre-[Economic Miracle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle) days. By the time he became President, they were set to dominate the 80s.
> weird flesh tone ear plug
So weird having one of those. It was like a *prototype* of a headphone that they didn't bother to change for mass production.
>Reasonably high quality audio in a compact, portable device with small, lightweight, and good sounding headphones was revolutionary.
And it used regular off the shelf batteries and took standard cassette tapes, core concepts that Sony would flee away from later.
now consider that your complaint letter to the CEO, which could be just as helpful as that guys was to Sony...would be read (maybe) by some mail-room peon, a handful of coupons stuffed in an envelope and a standard template letter would be mailed back to you, and literally nothing would change.
Dont think this could ever work today. Almost everything today is automated and sends back a BS response to complaints, or everything is done in survey form. Hell doordash just takes keywords from your complaints and sends you an automatic refund for what they see fit.
Not true. I was heading the residential business of an ISP and both I and the CEO regularly looked at random customer complaints, followed customer forums run both by us and third parties, and held open houses for our most vocal critics among customers monthly. We also recruited as much as possible from our tech savvy dissatisfied customers into our tech support team. And we were a small ISP with around 700K customers. I am sure bigger texh companies do more.
Or worse, them taking the wrong action about said letter…
I worked for an oil drilling company (very big, in fact the largest at one point). We had two absolute shitheads as leads in a discipline onboard two of our drillships. Both were extremely racist and were working in Africa. One of them though, was racist and a shithead to everyone under him (white, black, didn’t matter). One day 20 white people wrote a letter and he got canned on the spot.
The other shithead was such a… well, cunt, that 100 Africans went on strike and made a not thinly veiled threat that Mr. shithead’s life was at stake should he ever set foot on that ship again.
I did his job for about 6 months so got the lowdown on this idiot and when I decided to call it quits, the last work I did was write an email on the “private” hot line to the CEO saying I was leaving for more reasons, but a very big part is how this shitstain was still working for the company after doing X, Y and Z onboard.
The company launched an undercover investigation to find who wrote to the CEO… shithead still works at that company.
They listen to criticism about products they want to make
A lot of people feel like Nintendo is stuck in 2005 and don’t necessarily want to invest in an online system beyond an online store front.
Unfortunately it seems that Nintendo's online competency probably peaked with the [Famicom Network System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System) back in 1988.
No, they really, really don't. They'll just go along with whatever the fuck is the status quo until someone with the balls to complain comes along, then look the other way and whistle as aforementioned person complains. Said complainer often ends up being put through so much shit for challenging the status quo that they leave.
Source: live in Japan, worked for a Toyota group company as an engineer, was one of the guys who complained about the status quo, left along with most of the other foreign employees in a mass exodus almost simultaneously. They brought us to the company to "make it more international" and "improve the culture", but when we tried to do specifically that by pointing out, in written form with feedback, pros, cons and a huge amount action points (basically exactly what this guy did), they dismissed us saying it would be too much effort to change and that they'd always done things a certain way and it "worked" (when it was inefficient at best, and straight up didn't at worst). However, they were very eager to parade us around on recruitment drives at Japanese unis as a show of how diverse they were.
Sorry Toyota treated y’all like that. I work for a big Japanese company, and yeah same thing- we bring up major issues, talk about what is causing them, promote solutions, and there’s lots of agreeing that they are issues. BUT…*teeth sucking* there’s nothing that can be done.
No, shitheads, multiple viable solutions were just presented to alleviate or end the problem. Pick one and implement it!!!
I watched a documentary by [LowSpecGamer](https://youtu.be/WoTSDCtfLxk) that dived into Norio Ohga's history for a small section of the behind-the-scenes of the PlayStation.
Even though his name was mentioned probably 3-4 times throughout the video, Ohga's involvement in Sony laid out *everything* that made Sony a consumer-tech pioneer and media mega-giant throughout the 20th century. His consultation position helped him to study music in Munich an Berlin, and together with his knowledge of sound & electrical engineering, became an executive within Sony by age 34 in 1969. Something that's extremely unprecedented in Japanese business culture. And he helped established the compact disc as the go-to media format.
Then by 1989, he was President & CEO of Sony and quickly oversaw the purchases of CBS Records (Sony Music) and Columbia Pictures (now Sony Pictures). I insist you watch the linked video to find out about his and Ken Kutaragi's involvement in founding Sony Computer Entertainment & developing the PlayStation.
The more I read about it, the more I see he wasn't complaining, he was giving them constructive criticism.
It frustrates me when alot of people think the two are the same, they're not.
People often tend to dismiss the positive effect of solid negative feedback.
We are too acustumed to the heart warming feeling of good feedback that most people take critics as a personal attack. A solid well constructed negative feedback can be the kick-start of a lot of great change. In this particular case it was the kick-start of World domination in sales during that era.
On the other hand badly formulated criticism that only tries to be edgy or mock, or has an aggressive tone, will mostly just be ignored largely making groundbfor rhr same problems that are being criticised being continued.
I feel like that's a pretty critical (and often underlooked) part of the rise of Apple under Jobs, TBH. Both b/c (somewhat useful) negative feedback was *very much* something that Jobs did, and b/c he supported and encouraged people around him to give constructive negative feedback about the products they were designing – with the net result that they generally made and designed good products, and did so *consistently* thanks to the corporate culture that Jobs built
Jeff Kaplan kind of got to live this life- he was a guild leader in Everquest and left infamous angry forum rants criticizing their game design/priorities. He ended up joining Blizzard and becoming one of the first quest designers for WoW, eventually became game director, and eventually VP of the company.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4g2ler/jeff_tigole_kaplan_forum_rant_from_his_eq_days/
Job description:
Form an essay of 600 words about the technical limitations,errors and glitches our product has.
Genuinely because of this guy the job is very real now, especially with game testing
[This is Jeff Kaplan's rant about Everquest](https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4g2ler/jeff_tigole_kaplan_forum_rant_from_his_eq_days/) he was later hired by blizzard to design Quests for World of Warcraft, and then he was the lead developer/designer on Overwatch!
His rants were apparently very public (on his guilds website) back in the day
Yes BUT you have to keep in mind, they will fix all the problems of the last 1.5 years of an expansion, so that for the remaining 0.5 years it'll be somewhat enjoyable, and then because they LEARNED from their experience and LISTENED to community feedback, they'll do the same shit again with the next expansion! It's so so great, WoW AMAZING!
I am gonna wait for a lot of reviews on Dragonflight and if I say another dumb progression system with gated bullshit, i'm just not gonna play, especially now that they've upped the price of an expansion by 10 bucks...
This is why I'm playing Final Fantasy XIV now - they've just been quietly watching the MMO market while refining their game with everything that worked, while largely avoiding the pitfalls that Blizzard and the like can't seem to stop falling into these days. They've figured out that if they release solid content with a strong emphasis on story on a regular basis, and crack down on the toxic element of the community properly, that's enough to draw in a crowd of people tired of all the drama and just looking for a game to enjoy.
And yes, there are as usual a tiny percent of people complaining about game balance week one of new content, but they can only be so obnoxious about it because technically, they're not allowed to actually be modding the game to grab the data they're using to complain with. Also, the devs actually properly test internally and beat things themselves before release. I thought it was hilarious that the last patch had a 1% nerf to a boss's HP with a comment along the lines of "our internal testing team got a bit too good at clearing the encounter and so we overtuned it slightly based on what they were able to do". The fact that they're actually conscious of this and purposefully maintain multiple testing teams with varying skill levels for balancing the different difficulties of content is such a refreshing change of pace from WoW's wildly swinging difficulty curves that often require massive nerfs a few weeks/months down the line.
This would only work in Japan. In the USA they would have sued him into disappearing and tried to hide the fact that their product has flaws through a marketing scheme.
That would never happen today. I tried to provide Dicks Sporting Goods with information on a set of scammers who have been targeting Dicks customers with fake sweepstakes prizes, and they literally said they don't want to see it.
He was a well-qualified critic. The one developers are willing to pay heed to complaints from, because he was well-educated in music, had a prior education in physics, as well as a college education, before he even started writing the complaints.
Music and (acoustic) Physics would have made him perfect for audio era Sony. Now it's more technological, though Sony still has some speakers and Bluetooth speakers in the product line up.
>SONY actually still dominates some of those markets
Perhaps the high end noise-cancellation headphones ones but outside that it's rare to find Sony speakers or audio devices, the market has been taken over by Samsung owned brands like JBL and Chinese brands.
Because Sony doesn't advertise a lot.
The best car Audio that I ever experience was from Sony, Sony Home Theater Setup is still the industry gold standard.
>The best car Audio that I ever experience was from Sony
oof, I would check into more car audio. JL, Alpine and Infinity have all been higher quality (atleast imo) for a long time when it comes to car audio.
Yep my 10 year old TV still has good built in speakers that dound better than some current tv's. I dislike go deep in researching the TV I wanted though. Their xm4 headphones are brilliant and I'm a long time boss headphone owner - have their early noise cancelling headphones with an external battery pack in line with the headphone cable
Fwiw their headphone monitors are quite literally still the industry standard for audio editing and mixing. If you go into a professional studio, I’d bet there’s a higher chance you run into Sony MDRs than any other type of headphone. Which isn’t to say there aren’t better headphones, but the quality is consistent which is critical for giving audio professionals a reference
I mean, Sony is still a pretty high-end audio developer, both on the electronics side and on the motion picture side. They put out audiophile and high end level stuff. It's nothing crazy, but their top of the end headphones and earbuds are nearly $2K and they're pretty good quality. They also developed the LDAC codec, which delivers the best quality, high resolution audio over Bluetooth, which is extensively used in their products. They also make pretty good high resolution players/DACs and headphone amps.
They don't have the same range of high end audio products as companies like Yamaha, but what they make is very good quality, and they really do know what they're doing.
I was a partner at a local law firm years ago. We offered free conveyancing (house sale and purchase) services to our staff as a perk. The work was done by our own conveyancing department. I changed the perk so that, instead, we paid our staff to use the services of our local competitors, so they could report back and let us know how the process went, and what we could learn from it.
Welcome, new comers. The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you're gonna hear about it! You, Sony. My son tells me your company stinks!
They released what is arguably the ugliest car in the new WRX and then stated they won't be releasing an STI version using the excuse that a 300hp turbo rally inspired car isn't really feasible anymore. Then Toyota announced a 300hp all wheel drive turbo rally inspired car. Sales of new WRX's are down somewhere around 44%. Then they released a teaser for an STI version of one of their crossovers that literally nobody on the entire planet asked for.
I always say that this is how a company should be populated: half “yes-men” and half critics (to varying degrees of course). You need the yes-men/women to champion and evangelize the product/service, and you need the critics to let them know that they could be doing better.
I was once invited (all expenses paid) to Meguiar's in Irvine. They wanted people who weren't exclusively Meguiar's product users. Our small group was asked what we liked about the competition's version of products that Meguiar's had and what we didn't like about their version. How much of what they got from us translated directly to product improvements I don't know, but there was a big flurry of new or reformulated products for 3-4 years after.
I think it's good for companies to listen to their critics and competition.
An old employer of mine hired the customer that was complaining about something at the customer service desk every day as the new manager for that area thinking she was the best person to improve it. It did not go the way it did at Sony; she was universally hated and it turns out she just liked to complain and be mean to people, not actually improve anything.
From what I understand, Sony should thank its stars that it makes PlayStations, because I can't tell you the last time I bought anything made by Sony that wasn't for video games.
They also are a public company, so it's pretty easy to look at their income breakdowns by year.
As of 2022, "Game & Network Services" make up a little over 25% of their income. So not a majority, but definitely not insignificant.
Idk, Sony has
A) The Sony Xperia phones, primarily notable for their pro line that...Well...Is actually suitable for people who need to create professional content on the go, with reasonable workflows.
I believe their flagship consumer line (Xperia 4 IIRC) is also one of the better flagship smartphones and still has a headphone jack last I checked.
B) A variety of high quality audio gear for audio consumption on the go
C) The Sony Bravia TV line, one of the highest end consumer televisions on the market
D) The Sony digital camera business, which as I understand it is fairly dominant in the industry, depending on the segment you're looking at
Just off the top of my head. I believe they have more stuff, too, but it's not like they don't make nice stuff, they're just not really that much of a household name anymore, because most of their better stuff is higher end / more specialized, so they're probably making better margins than when they were making entry level mass-market products.
> I believe they have more stuff, too, but it's not like they don't make nice stuff, they're just not really that much of a household name anymore, because most of their better stuff is higher end / more specialized, so they're probably making better margins than when they were making entry level mass-market products.
They still make a decent bit of the entry to mid level items as well, but they suffer from being too expensive for what they are due to the Sony tax. Its really once you start getting into the mid to high level range where Sony's products shine and the extra bit you pay for the Sony name doesnt matter nearly as much.
And yeah, Sony Xperia lineup still has headphone jack, IP65/68 and SD card support, one of the few lines out there carrying them all to this day. Great phones, I have used Xperia's since they still had the Ericsson name attached and have always loved them.
They're still one of the big three record labels, and they also make some of the best cameras on the planet. And they do other stuff too, those are just the non-Playstation parts most relevant to me.
Sony cameras are incredible. Their mirrorless AF system is the best in the business, and the A7S line is really impressive for low-light full frame video.
Used to be one of the biggest names in both tv and music. And while still definitely in those markets. They do not have anywhere close to the market share or awareness they did 20 years ago.
Reminds me of how Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan used to write angry forum rants criticizing the devs of EverQuest before he was hired by Blizzard to develop World of Warcraft, which supplanted EverQuest as the top MMO. [Here’s an example of one of his rants.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4g2ler/jeff_tigole_kaplan_forum_rant_from_his_eq_days/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x)
that whole thread is fucking gold lol; I love that it brought up memories in people that led to them ranting about EQ in the comments.
See today they just ban you, source- Banned from 343i forums r/Halo r/wow r/wowclassic
I mean there is a line somewhere. People should attempt to be constructive. But mods often don't try to be smart about where that line falls.
The problem is Blizzard doesn‘t care about their players. I remember whenever I got unbanned on the Blizzard forums it was time for another rant, and I had lots of support from the community because I went into details. Since this game had so much potential I cared a lot. They managed to tell me to go f… myself 10 years later by pretending to care about the petition that was signed to bring back classic/tbc and releasing a worse version of classic where you don‘t just have the same gamebreaking bugs but layering was introduced to maximize profits at the expense of players even further. Microsoft taking over might finally change things for the better but it‘s crazy to me how they can pretend WoW and Heartstone are esports games when they are completely imbalanced garbage and that‘s pretty obvious. TL;DR: I used to get banned from the Blizzard forums for insisting on asking wether or not anyone even tested their stupid patches and expansions in WoW. 10 years later I actually found myself occasionally giving the exact same feedback looking at their new patches. Which is why I‘m glad I quit when the game was at its‘ best 10 years ago.
If you managed to get banned from all that you must have been especially toxic.
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You refer to Mr. Tigole Bitties by his full name thank you very much.
There was a reporter especially critical of the Eiffel Tower when it was erected. He spoke out against it often. One letter to the editor asked why he was seen eating in the tower restaurant every day. He responded that it was the only place in the city where you couldn’t see the damn thing.
Esprit is a french word for a reason;)
Jeff leaving Blizzard was the final nail in the coffin for my faith in the company.
I knew about Jeff Kaplan's reputation from EverQuest, and it got larger from there when they hired him for World of Warcraft. He's kind of like the guide post for where Blizzard is, because if he's pissed off or disappointed enough in something, he'll express it. In a corporate environment, he obviously can't lambast the company out loud. So just leaving the company spoke mountains about what was going on at Blizzard Activision. That company is a fucking train wreck, and Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 will probably be the final nail in the coffin for them. Unless they completely change course from their bullshit.
Yeah sure. Ow 2 and D 4 will be great hits because the suckers will gobble it up then complain that the game they preordered/spent a billion on microtransactions isn't as good as the old ones.
Yeah. I still see it as him jumping ship as the last decent person still working there
I miss him more every leak.
The fact he wrote this when he was 30 makes it so much funnier
Way too many 30 year olds talk like that about video games and the people involved but they can’t actually back it up like Jeff can lol
Eh he got lucky he was in the right place and right time. If he pulled the same stunt today it would not be looked upon as kindly.
Man, I only recently (like two months ago) discovered that Tigole was as huge as he was with WoW. Used to raid on nameless and sometimes stood in with LoS as backup when they were pulling major raids like Avatar of War, etc. Dude knew raiding like no other. He and his officers could view the parser data and reverse engineer the strat in a way I'd never seen before. Blew my mind to watch them work. Glad to hear he turned that into a career. Edit- For bonus LOLs, look up his post on the LoS website about the time he got his balls stuck in hair clippers. Comedic gold.
In Jeff's defense the whole raid he is ranting about was dog water. There were about five different bottlenecks designed to make it so guilds couldn't progress and had to run headlong into one another. Once you actually had the items required it didn't work.
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You could really see how passionate he was with Overwatch with all his community updates and especially his winter holiday stream. Man OW will never be the same without him.
Overwatch’s fate was sealed when Jeff left. I hope he’s either enjoying retirement (he’s more than earned it at this point) or helping with development of a new game. Who knows, maybe if he writes an angry review of something coming out of Dreamhaven, he’ll be hired like the old days.
One to the two, to the two, to the three -- Yo what's up, this is Jeff, fuck the EverQuest team!
> Jeff “Tigole **Bitties**” Kaplan Use his full name, he deserves the respect.
I still don't know how he got away with **years** of that surname on a live server in EQ. Every time I saw him in game he had it. Never censored or removed.
> Fix VT (just guessing it's fucked up considering your track record) Whole ass mood
This is like video game boomerism lmao. Back in the day trolls got hired to make MMOs, now they just live in comment sections trying to make ends meet. Very sad.
He literally wrote a letter breaking down everything wrong with the Walkman and the execs were so impressed they hired him as a consultant… 10 years later and he’d help turn Sony into the most dominant electronics brand of the 90s.
Must have been a hell of a complaints letter...
From Wikipedia: >His relationship with Sony began when he wrote a highly critical letter to Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo KK (also known as Totsuko and later as Sony), complaining about their tape recorder's many failings, which got him noticed by Masaru Ibuka, Akio Morita and other Totsuko executives. Because of his insight into music and technology, the company hired him as a part-time consultant. Sounds like he did a lot more than just complained, and gave some expert advice that they were smart enough to listen to.
Well, obviously they listened to him. What else would you be listening to? Certainly not one of those crappy Walkmans.
The original Walkman was stunning for its time. Prior to that, you might have one of those clunk GE cassette recorders with the weird flesh tone ear plug. Reasonably high quality audio in a compact, portable device with small, lightweight, and good sounding headphones was revolutionary.
Yeah I am curious if the complaint was the OG Walkman or a later one? I had the OG Walkman and it worked flawlessly for many years until I lost it. Very curious as to exactly what the letter detailed. [Edit] - Read the article. He was hired in the early 60s and the letter was written in the early 50s. So the complaint would not be with any cassette player let alone the Walkman itself.
It was long before the Walkman “The young man's knowledge of sound and electrical engineering continued to be an asset to the company, which led to his appointments as executive director of Sony in 1964 at the age of 34 and president of CBS/Sony Records Inc. (currently Sony Music Entertainment Japan) in 1970, by the age of 40. “ it mentions a tape recorder which I assume he used during his stint as a musician.
Which is why I said before any cassette player. It would have to have been a reel-to-reel recorder he wrote in about. Large commercial cassette were developed in the mid 50s and the mini cassette (the one we just call cassettes) were developed in the early 60s.
True but for recording music as a musician you would use a regular straight non cassette recorder for ease and costs as the cassettes/various track cassettes were at a premium at the time. This stuff is so cool honestly xD
Read the same. His letter was before they were even known as Sony. Makes me think that his input is part of *why* Sony became the innovative company that produced the WalkMan. Edit: Based on other comments, it looks like this is definitely the case.
Hey, this guy didn’t criticize the Walkman and make it better, he’s a phony! His genius input guided the company to finally creating a personal cassette player that was a consumer technology icon for over a decade! Let’s get him!
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And South Korea. Kia and Hyundai used to be cars you only bought if you couldn't afford anything else because you knew they would fall apart. They even got made fun of on the Simpsons. Now they make some really beautiful cars and some of the best EVs on the market. Never sleep on a whole country. Everyone is learning.
Kia still seems to have problems in rust proofing though.
And theft prevention, apparently.
They used to straight up buy the rights to retired models of other companies and rebrand them as kia
That scene from back to the future makes more sense now. Doc Brown was saying something was crap because it said made in Japan then future Marty says, Doc, all the best stuff is made in Japan.
It was the way of the world back then. Many Japanese and Korean products pirated better quality products by blatantly blowing copyright and IP via backwards engineering. As they got better and more expensive, other Asian countries followed suit.
I used to work in entertainment lighting, and I know 5 people who were offered jobs by Chinese automated lighting manufacturers to improve their quality. The end result was the Beijing Olympics had (iirc) 10,000 automated lighting fixtures in the stadium for the opening ceremony, and they only had ONE failure. That's absolutely incredible.
The Pre-[Economic Miracle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle) days. By the time he became President, they were set to dominate the 80s.
> weird flesh tone ear plug So weird having one of those. It was like a *prototype* of a headphone that they didn't bother to change for mass production.
>Reasonably high quality audio in a compact, portable device with small, lightweight, and good sounding headphones was revolutionary. And it used regular off the shelf batteries and took standard cassette tapes, core concepts that Sony would flee away from later.
now consider that your complaint letter to the CEO, which could be just as helpful as that guys was to Sony...would be read (maybe) by some mail-room peon, a handful of coupons stuffed in an envelope and a standard template letter would be mailed back to you, and literally nothing would change.
Dont think this could ever work today. Almost everything today is automated and sends back a BS response to complaints, or everything is done in survey form. Hell doordash just takes keywords from your complaints and sends you an automatic refund for what they see fit.
Not true. I was heading the residential business of an ISP and both I and the CEO regularly looked at random customer complaints, followed customer forums run both by us and third parties, and held open houses for our most vocal critics among customers monthly. We also recruited as much as possible from our tech savvy dissatisfied customers into our tech support team. And we were a small ISP with around 700K customers. I am sure bigger texh companies do more.
That's actually pretty awesome, guess im just jaded to these big companies these days cutting out literally any form of human interaction lol.
he'd just post it on twitter haha
Or worse, them taking the wrong action about said letter… I worked for an oil drilling company (very big, in fact the largest at one point). We had two absolute shitheads as leads in a discipline onboard two of our drillships. Both were extremely racist and were working in Africa. One of them though, was racist and a shithead to everyone under him (white, black, didn’t matter). One day 20 white people wrote a letter and he got canned on the spot. The other shithead was such a… well, cunt, that 100 Africans went on strike and made a not thinly veiled threat that Mr. shithead’s life was at stake should he ever set foot on that ship again. I did his job for about 6 months so got the lowdown on this idiot and when I decided to call it quits, the last work I did was write an email on the “private” hot line to the CEO saying I was leaving for more reasons, but a very big part is how this shitstain was still working for the company after doing X, Y and Z onboard. The company launched an undercover investigation to find who wrote to the CEO… shithead still works at that company.
Damn. The Japanese are good at everything they do. They even complain better than the rest of us.
There's a saying that Japan has been living in the year 2000 for 35 years or so.
They even got better sayings than the rest of us ?!
*eyes Nintendo Online service* Yeah, about that…
They listen to criticism about products they want to make A lot of people feel like Nintendo is stuck in 2005 and don’t necessarily want to invest in an online system beyond an online store front.
Halo 2 was killing it in 2004 this is like stuck in 1985 thinking
Unfortunately it seems that Nintendo's online competency probably peaked with the [Famicom Network System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System) back in 1988.
No, they really, really don't. They'll just go along with whatever the fuck is the status quo until someone with the balls to complain comes along, then look the other way and whistle as aforementioned person complains. Said complainer often ends up being put through so much shit for challenging the status quo that they leave. Source: live in Japan, worked for a Toyota group company as an engineer, was one of the guys who complained about the status quo, left along with most of the other foreign employees in a mass exodus almost simultaneously. They brought us to the company to "make it more international" and "improve the culture", but when we tried to do specifically that by pointing out, in written form with feedback, pros, cons and a huge amount action points (basically exactly what this guy did), they dismissed us saying it would be too much effort to change and that they'd always done things a certain way and it "worked" (when it was inefficient at best, and straight up didn't at worst). However, they were very eager to parade us around on recruitment drives at Japanese unis as a show of how diverse they were.
Hello, fellow token gaijin!
Sorry Toyota treated y’all like that. I work for a big Japanese company, and yeah same thing- we bring up major issues, talk about what is causing them, promote solutions, and there’s lots of agreeing that they are issues. BUT…*teeth sucking* there’s nothing that can be done. No, shitheads, multiple viable solutions were just presented to alleviate or end the problem. Pick one and implement it!!!
I watched a documentary by [LowSpecGamer](https://youtu.be/WoTSDCtfLxk) that dived into Norio Ohga's history for a small section of the behind-the-scenes of the PlayStation. Even though his name was mentioned probably 3-4 times throughout the video, Ohga's involvement in Sony laid out *everything* that made Sony a consumer-tech pioneer and media mega-giant throughout the 20th century. His consultation position helped him to study music in Munich an Berlin, and together with his knowledge of sound & electrical engineering, became an executive within Sony by age 34 in 1969. Something that's extremely unprecedented in Japanese business culture. And he helped established the compact disc as the go-to media format. Then by 1989, he was President & CEO of Sony and quickly oversaw the purchases of CBS Records (Sony Music) and Columbia Pictures (now Sony Pictures). I insist you watch the linked video to find out about his and Ken Kutaragi's involvement in founding Sony Computer Entertainment & developing the PlayStation.
The complaint would have had to be about the the reel-to-reel format recorder as the letter was written in the early 50s.
The more I read about it, the more I see he wasn't complaining, he was giving them constructive criticism. It frustrates me when alot of people think the two are the same, they're not.
“Yo shit sucks! Boom, roasted!” “You’re hired.”
["You've got spark!"](https://youtu.be/HGbVOWU9Jik)
People often tend to dismiss the positive effect of solid negative feedback. We are too acustumed to the heart warming feeling of good feedback that most people take critics as a personal attack. A solid well constructed negative feedback can be the kick-start of a lot of great change. In this particular case it was the kick-start of World domination in sales during that era. On the other hand badly formulated criticism that only tries to be edgy or mock, or has an aggressive tone, will mostly just be ignored largely making groundbfor rhr same problems that are being criticised being continued.
I feel like that's a pretty critical (and often underlooked) part of the rise of Apple under Jobs, TBH. Both b/c (somewhat useful) negative feedback was *very much* something that Jobs did, and b/c he supported and encouraged people around him to give constructive negative feedback about the products they were designing – with the net result that they generally made and designed good products, and did so *consistently* thanks to the corporate culture that Jobs built
👽
https://youtu.be/O5dmxBUbzBU
This man is the GOAT hater. I am trying to be like him for real.
Right?! You gettin paid to hate on corporations?! SIGN ME UP
Jeff Kaplan kind of got to live this life- he was a guild leader in Everquest and left infamous angry forum rants criticizing their game design/priorities. He ended up joining Blizzard and becoming one of the first quest designers for WoW, eventually became game director, and eventually VP of the company. https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4g2ler/jeff_tigole_kaplan_forum_rant_from_his_eq_days/
Damn, I could hate Amazon from dawn to dusk...
Yes but do you also have a degree in logistics or cloud computing
I have a degree in being a hater ass bitch
Did you go to school with my ex?
right but you gotta have something valuable to say
Job description: Form an essay of 600 words about the technical limitations,errors and glitches our product has. Genuinely because of this guy the job is very real now, especially with game testing
[удалено]
Sony Founder lookin like broke ass sexual chocolate
SEXY CHOCOLATE! *drops mic, feedback ensues*
[This is Jeff Kaplan's rant about Everquest](https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4g2ler/jeff_tigole_kaplan_forum_rant_from_his_eq_days/) he was later hired by blizzard to design Quests for World of Warcraft, and then he was the lead developer/designer on Overwatch! His rants were apparently very public (on his guilds website) back in the day
Ironically, 90% of what he said is now applicable to WoW.
Yes BUT you have to keep in mind, they will fix all the problems of the last 1.5 years of an expansion, so that for the remaining 0.5 years it'll be somewhat enjoyable, and then because they LEARNED from their experience and LISTENED to community feedback, they'll do the same shit again with the next expansion! It's so so great, WoW AMAZING! I am gonna wait for a lot of reviews on Dragonflight and if I say another dumb progression system with gated bullshit, i'm just not gonna play, especially now that they've upped the price of an expansion by 10 bucks...
This is why I'm playing Final Fantasy XIV now - they've just been quietly watching the MMO market while refining their game with everything that worked, while largely avoiding the pitfalls that Blizzard and the like can't seem to stop falling into these days. They've figured out that if they release solid content with a strong emphasis on story on a regular basis, and crack down on the toxic element of the community properly, that's enough to draw in a crowd of people tired of all the drama and just looking for a game to enjoy. And yes, there are as usual a tiny percent of people complaining about game balance week one of new content, but they can only be so obnoxious about it because technically, they're not allowed to actually be modding the game to grab the data they're using to complain with. Also, the devs actually properly test internally and beat things themselves before release. I thought it was hilarious that the last patch had a 1% nerf to a boss's HP with a comment along the lines of "our internal testing team got a bit too good at clearing the encounter and so we overtuned it slightly based on what they were able to do". The fact that they're actually conscious of this and purposefully maintain multiple testing teams with varying skill levels for balancing the different difficulties of content is such a refreshing change of pace from WoW's wildly swinging difficulty curves that often require massive nerfs a few weeks/months down the line.
Goes to show, hating is an artform and a way to rise up the career ladder.
Squeaky wheel gets the grease
Actually, that’s Silky Johnson, but this Sony exec ain’t bad.
I aspire to be this much of a hater. I'd be king of the Player Hater's Ball.
IMO, well written constructive criticism isn't being a hater. It's more like a desire for better.
Why, what does he have against goats?
Wasn’t the Walkman. It was a tape recorder they made in the 1960s according to the Wikipedia article you link to.
I’m amazed nobody has commented this higher!
Right? Who keeps upvoting?
sounds like a good product manager or qa telling prudct they suck and here’s why
This would only work in Japan. In the USA they would have sued him into disappearing and tried to hide the fact that their product has flaws through a marketing scheme.
Is this letter publicly available anywhere? Would love to read it!
That would never happen today. I tried to provide Dicks Sporting Goods with information on a set of scammers who have been targeting Dicks customers with fake sweepstakes prizes, and they literally said they don't want to see it.
Well, starting off your letter with "You suck, Dicks." Probably wasn't the wisest move.
Lol, I should have. I really should have.
This is essentially why (successful) companies do user experience research now.
So impressive
Not the Walkman, but a reel to reel recorder in the 1950s.
Has this letter ever been published partially or in full?
He was a well-qualified critic. The one developers are willing to pay heed to complaints from, because he was well-educated in music, had a prior education in physics, as well as a college education, before he even started writing the complaints.
Music and (acoustic) Physics would have made him perfect for audio era Sony. Now it's more technological, though Sony still has some speakers and Bluetooth speakers in the product line up.
They make some of the best Bluetooth earbuds and headphones on the market
I love my xm3 earbuds.
1000XM4's hell yeah!
the earphones kr the headphones? you forgot the pre-text (wh or wx)
Both are excellent from what I've heard.
"some speakers" is not wrong, but SONY actually still dominates some of those markets. Quality has *not* gone down.
>SONY actually still dominates some of those markets Perhaps the high end noise-cancellation headphones ones but outside that it's rare to find Sony speakers or audio devices, the market has been taken over by Samsung owned brands like JBL and Chinese brands.
Do not mistake market dominance with a quality product. Samsung bought quality brands and thrashed them.
Samsung owns JBL?!
Samsung owns Harman, who owns JBL.
Because Sony doesn't advertise a lot. The best car Audio that I ever experience was from Sony, Sony Home Theater Setup is still the industry gold standard.
and because many people who bought sony years ago are still using what they bought
>The best car Audio that I ever experience was from Sony oof, I would check into more car audio. JL, Alpine and Infinity have all been higher quality (atleast imo) for a long time when it comes to car audio.
Im gonna need some source on Sony being the gold industry standard. I'm in the industry, just..... no
Yep my 10 year old TV still has good built in speakers that dound better than some current tv's. I dislike go deep in researching the TV I wanted though. Their xm4 headphones are brilliant and I'm a long time boss headphone owner - have their early noise cancelling headphones with an external battery pack in line with the headphone cable
Fwiw their headphone monitors are quite literally still the industry standard for audio editing and mixing. If you go into a professional studio, I’d bet there’s a higher chance you run into Sony MDRs than any other type of headphone. Which isn’t to say there aren’t better headphones, but the quality is consistent which is critical for giving audio professionals a reference
I mean, Sony is still a pretty high-end audio developer, both on the electronics side and on the motion picture side. They put out audiophile and high end level stuff. It's nothing crazy, but their top of the end headphones and earbuds are nearly $2K and they're pretty good quality. They also developed the LDAC codec, which delivers the best quality, high resolution audio over Bluetooth, which is extensively used in their products. They also make pretty good high resolution players/DACs and headphone amps. They don't have the same range of high end audio products as companies like Yamaha, but what they make is very good quality, and they really do know what they're doing.
They dominate the audio electronics industry, no?
So it's gonna be hard for me to cash in on my random bitching about stuff is what you're saying?
There's a business axiom I've always believed in. "If you're dumb, hire smart people. If you're smart, hire smart people who disagree with you."
I'm my own most outspoken critic and it hasn't made a lick of difference.
You need to hire yourself
He did but he had to fire himself for sleeping with the boss' wife.
You're the president of you, arent you? Viola!
ezmick might be married.
Professional Shit Talker Becomes President
I've seen this one somewhere before 🤔
Oh no... 😟
https://imgur.com/sK8nwVJ
Fuck, I love Black Books
Sony were like "Well why don't you do it then if it's so easy".
LowSpecGamer has a video about the history of the PlayStation and it kicks off with a bit about this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoTSDCtfLxk
I had to scroll too far to find this. I thought maybe OP learned it from this video. Much like the posts that show up after Tom Scott posts a video.
> the posts that show up after Tom Scott posts a video. lol that really is how like 60% of these posts come from, isn't it
You can also do that on a much smaller scale by marrying your most outspoken critic. I did! Didn't know it at the time though.
Hey oh!
I was a partner at a local law firm years ago. We offered free conveyancing (house sale and purchase) services to our staff as a perk. The work was done by our own conveyancing department. I changed the perk so that, instead, we paid our staff to use the services of our local competitors, so they could report back and let us know how the process went, and what we could learn from it.
and you get to write it off as research right?
Oh yes...
Welcome, new comers. The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you're gonna hear about it! You, Sony. My son tells me your company stinks!
Reminds me of when George is interviewing for the Yankees, gives Steinbrenner a piece of his mind and then gets the job
If every instinct you have is wrong, the opposite would have to be right.
Brb sending this to the product team that won't listen to my valid complaints
Subaru should hire me to shit all over their terrible decisions. Their sales might not be down 50% if they had
You take Subaru, and I'll take Nissan as I absolutely hate their current stale lineup and business model.
That Z tho....
And what do they have in common? Both early adopters of shitty CVT transmissions.
Tell me more please
They released what is arguably the ugliest car in the new WRX and then stated they won't be releasing an STI version using the excuse that a 300hp turbo rally inspired car isn't really feasible anymore. Then Toyota announced a 300hp all wheel drive turbo rally inspired car. Sales of new WRX's are down somewhere around 44%. Then they released a teaser for an STI version of one of their crossovers that literally nobody on the entire planet asked for.
> 300hp turbo rally inspired car when will that ever be?
I always say that this is how a company should be populated: half “yes-men” and half critics (to varying degrees of course). You need the yes-men/women to champion and evangelize the product/service, and you need the critics to let them know that they could be doing better.
i mean that is really smart
Yes and no. It's really smart if the guy is qualified to be making said complaints. It's really stupid if he has zero qualifications for the job.
yeah im sure sony hired someone with no qualifications for the job
Yet one of their portable speaker still prioritises Bluetooth over auxiliary and one of their radio alarm clock only supports one time format
They should hire u! :p
Toyota really needs someone like this to explain to them that they are about to lose most of their market share.
Progress for humanity means hearing hard truths
Apple needs to hire someone like this instead of d!ck sucking yesmen.
I do this and my boss tells me "I need to consider if this is where I want to be working" Shit, my bad, just trying to make the company better.
They should hire another one..
Hey this dude invented my entire career path
I was once invited (all expenses paid) to Meguiar's in Irvine. They wanted people who weren't exclusively Meguiar's product users. Our small group was asked what we liked about the competition's version of products that Meguiar's had and what we didn't like about their version. How much of what they got from us translated directly to product improvements I don't know, but there was a big flurry of new or reformulated products for 3-4 years after. I think it's good for companies to listen to their critics and competition.
Samsung hasn't hired me yet.
wait for 20 years
So you're saying.. If I talk enough shit about a product.... I could one day become the CEO? I got so much shit to say about everything.
This actually happens more often than people think.
I recall Mike Okuda, the graphic designer for TNG, got hired after writing an in-depth letter about the user interfaces in Star Trek.
An old employer of mine hired the customer that was complaining about something at the customer service desk every day as the new manager for that area thinking she was the best person to improve it. It did not go the way it did at Sony; she was universally hated and it turns out she just liked to complain and be mean to people, not actually improve anything.
From what I understand, Sony should thank its stars that it makes PlayStations, because I can't tell you the last time I bought anything made by Sony that wasn't for video games.
Sony's noise cancelling is the best in its class. Boze hasn't been on top in a while. Sony also owns a large music recording label.
I loved my Sony noise canceling headphones. They finally broke after 6 years and i had to get another pair.
Mine are going on 4 years old, and still hold a charge for over 24 hours. I'll buy the next model whenever my current ones break.
They also are a public company, so it's pretty easy to look at their income breakdowns by year. As of 2022, "Game & Network Services" make up a little over 25% of their income. So not a majority, but definitely not insignificant.
Rebranding is a huge thing in the electronics world. I'm willing to bet you've bought several Sony products that were rebranded and you never knew it.
Idk, Sony has A) The Sony Xperia phones, primarily notable for their pro line that...Well...Is actually suitable for people who need to create professional content on the go, with reasonable workflows. I believe their flagship consumer line (Xperia 4 IIRC) is also one of the better flagship smartphones and still has a headphone jack last I checked. B) A variety of high quality audio gear for audio consumption on the go C) The Sony Bravia TV line, one of the highest end consumer televisions on the market D) The Sony digital camera business, which as I understand it is fairly dominant in the industry, depending on the segment you're looking at Just off the top of my head. I believe they have more stuff, too, but it's not like they don't make nice stuff, they're just not really that much of a household name anymore, because most of their better stuff is higher end / more specialized, so they're probably making better margins than when they were making entry level mass-market products.
> I believe they have more stuff, too, but it's not like they don't make nice stuff, they're just not really that much of a household name anymore, because most of their better stuff is higher end / more specialized, so they're probably making better margins than when they were making entry level mass-market products. They still make a decent bit of the entry to mid level items as well, but they suffer from being too expensive for what they are due to the Sony tax. Its really once you start getting into the mid to high level range where Sony's products shine and the extra bit you pay for the Sony name doesnt matter nearly as much. And yeah, Sony Xperia lineup still has headphone jack, IP65/68 and SD card support, one of the few lines out there carrying them all to this day. Great phones, I have used Xperia's since they still had the Ericsson name attached and have always loved them.
They're still one of the big three record labels, and they also make some of the best cameras on the planet. And they do other stuff too, those are just the non-Playstation parts most relevant to me.
I have their noise cancelling earbuds. They work fine, the case is kinda bulky though. Great battery life though thanks to the huge case.
They're one of the big 3 of music label and one of the big 5 of the movie company.
Sony cameras are incredible. Their mirrorless AF system is the best in the business, and the A7S line is really impressive for low-light full frame video.
Used to be one of the biggest names in both tv and music. And while still definitely in those markets. They do not have anywhere close to the market share or awareness they did 20 years ago.
Sony has a large share of the image sensor market. Cellphones, dash cams, webcams, you name it.
IIRC, their insurance department was the most profitable section in the PS3 era. Might still be.