Sony Taps Ex-Vaio Executive Abary to Head Core CE Operations

Sony named former Vaio PC executive Mike Abary to head its core CE operations as it lays the groundwork for launching Google TV-based products in the fall. Abary, most recently senior vice president of Sony’s IT Division, assumes a new post that will oversee the company’s sprawling TV, home AV and connected home products groups, the company said.

The move is designed to speed up internal decision-making and time to market and give Sony CE products more of an IT bent as a competitive peg in the marketplace, Abary said. He'll report to Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow. “My intention is to bring speed and innovation that’s normally associated with IT to our TV, home audio/video and connected home businesses in the U.S.,” Abary told us. “It’s speed of decision making and speed of understanding the consumer market and its needs, not from a reactive standpoint, but from an anticipatory standpoint. We need to be fast in anticipating what consumer trends are looking like and what they may look like going forward."

Abary and his team also will work closely with other Sony divisions -- personal imaging and audio, networked technology and services and media application and solutions -- to ensure consistency and swift cross-platform decision making, Abary said. The faster pace that has been a hallmark of Sony’s consumer IT operations was something that Sony may have lacked in CE, he said. Being more nimble will be key as Sony strives to lead the charge in 3D and Internet-enabled TVs and others products, he said.

Sony is expected to ship the first of its Bravia 3D TVs by mid-year and has hinted that the technology will likely play a role in its Google TV-based products. The lead role would contrast with Sony’s stumbles in flat-panel TV where it was forced to strike supply alliances in LCD and plasma TV in the 1990s after clinging to its CRT-based business. Sony also missed the shift in digital music where its iconic Walkman was eclipsed by Apple’s iPod and other digital audio players.

"We haven’t necessarily been at the forefront against our competition in terms of technology and perhaps that was attributable to decisions that were made in the past,” Abary conceded. “That’s something I have to dig into. But part of our aggressiveness and growth plans will be to insure we are leading in certain categories for television and that we are competitive at the start in the marketplace. To achieve that you have to be very quick to move at the speed of business."

That Sony has adopted the Google TV platform was a “huge” decision, Abary said. He’s charged with making sure Google TV software and application development “is what our customers would expect from us,” he said. He wouldn’t disclose details of Sony’s Google TV products, but indicated there will be a line of products that resides alongside the company’s other Internet-related services, including the Sony PlayStation Network and Bravia Internet Video, he said. Both of those services will continue to run independently of the Google platform, but will also tie into it, Abary said. PlayStation Network and Bravia Internet Video need to be “maintained from a leading-edge standpoint,” but they will be “up to speed with the Google platform,” he said. Once Sony introduces its first Google TV products in the fall, it expects “with the evolution of the Google TV platform it will grow from there,” he said.

As he takes charge of Sony’s TV business, Abary will re-evaluate Sony plans to install 2D-to-3D conversion chips in its TVs, he said. Sony U.K. was first to disclose a feature called “3D Up-conversion” in its Bravia 3D LCD TVs, and released a disclaimer lowering consumers’ expectations about how the 3D simulations would look if rendered from poor-quality 2D content. Sony in the U.S. has confirmed that sets sold in that country will also have the feature, though the company hasn’t said whether it will use the same disclaimers as Sony U.K. Sony is a charter sponsor of ESPN 3D, and ESPN executives have been vocal in their opposition to conversion chips being built into 3D TVs. “I'm going to look at up-conversion and our native 3D-capable TVs and really understand the pros and cons moving forward,” Abary said. “I haven’t dug in as much as I should have up until this point to really have a position on it, but once I do I will make sure we will communicate that position very clearly.”