SONY公司英文简介

SONY公司英文简介

Sony Corporation (ソニー株式会社 Sonī Kabushiki Gaisha?) (TYO: 6758, NYSE: SNE), or commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate with revenue exceeding ¥ 7.730.0 trillion, or US$77.20 billion (FY2010).[3] Sony is one of the leading manufacturers of electronics, products for the consumer and professional markets.
Sony Corporation is the electronics business unit and the parent company of the Sony Group, which is engaged in business through its eight operating segments – Consumer Products & Devices (CPD), Networked Products & Services (NPS), B2B & Disc Manufacturing (B2B & Disc), Pictures, Music, Financial Services, Sony Ericsson and All Other.[5][6] These make Sony one of the most comprehensive entertainment companies in the world. Sony's principal business operations include Sony Corporation (Sony Electronics in the U.S.), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Ericsson, and Sony Financial. As a semiconductor maker, Sony is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.
Its founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka derived the name from sonus, the Latin word for sound, and also from the English slang word "sonny", since they considered themselves to be "sonny boys", a loan word into Japanese which in the early 1950s connoted smart and presentable young men.[7]
When Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was looking for a romanized name to use to market themselves, they strongly considered using their initials, TTK. The primary reason they did not is that the railway company Tokyo Kyuko was known as TKK.[8] The company occasionally used the acronym "Totsuko" in Japan, but during his visit to the United States, Morita discovered that Americans had trouble pronouncing that name. Another early name that was tried out for a while was "Tokyo Teletech" until Morita discovered that there was an American company already using Teletech as a brand name.[12]
The name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of two words. One was the Latin word Sonus which is the root of "sonic" and "sound" and the other was "sonny," a familiar term used in 1950s America to call a boy.[7] The first Sony-branded product, the TR-55 transistor radio, appeared in 1955 but the company name did not change to Sony until January 1958.[13]
At the time of the change, it was extremely unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters to spell its name instead of writing it in kanji. The move was not without opposition: TTK's principal bank at the time, Mitsui, had strong feelings about the name. They pushed for a name such as Sony Electronic Industries, or Sony Teletech. Akio Morita was firm, however, as he did not want the company name tied to any particular industry. Eventually, both Ibuka and Mitsui Bank's chairman gave their approval.[8]
Sony has historically been notable for creating its own in-house standards for new recording and storage technologies, instead of adopting those of other manufacturers and standards bodies. The most infamous of these was the videotape format war of the early 1980s, when Sony marketed the Betamax system for video cassette recorders against the VHS format developed by JVC. In the end, VHS gained critical mass in the marketplace and became the worldwide standard for consumer VCRs and Sony adopted the format. While Betamax is for all practical purposes an obsolete format, a professional-oriented component video format called Betacam that was derived from Betamax is still used today, especially in the film and television industry.
In 1968 Sony introduced the Trinitron brand name for its line of aperture grille cathode ray tube televisions and (later) computer monitors. Trinitron displays are still produced, but only for markets such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and China. Sony discontinued the last Trinitron-based television set in the USA in early 2007. Trinitron computer monitors were discontinued in 2005.
Sony launched the Betamax videocassette recording format in 1975. In 1979 the Walkman brand was introduced, in the form of the world's first portable music player.
1982 saw the launch of Sony's professional Betacam videotape format and the collaborative Compact Disc format. In 1983 Sony introduced 90 mm micro diskettes (better known as 3.5-inch (89 mm) floppy disks), which it had developed at a time when there were 4" floppy disks and a lot of variations from different companies to replace the then on-going 5.25" floppy disks. Sony had great success and the format became dominant; 3.5" floppy disks gradually became obsolete as they were replaced by current media formats. In 1983 Sony launched the MSX, a home computer system, and introduced the world (with their counterpart Philips) to the Compact Disc or CD. In 1984 Sony launched the Discman series which extended their Walkman brand to portable CD products. In 1985 Sony launched their Handycam products and the Video8 format. Video8 and the follow-on hi-band Hi8 format became popular in the consumer camcorder market. In 1987 Sony launched the 4 mm DAT or Digital Audio Tape as a new digital audio tape standard.

Sony Discman
In addition to developing consumer-based recording media, after the launch of the CD Sony began development of commercially based recording media. In 1986 they launched Write-Once optical discs (WO) and in 1988 launched Magneto-optical discs which were around 125MB size for the specific use of archival data storage.[14]
In the early 1990s two high-density optical storage standards were being developed: one was the MultiMedia Compact Disc (MMCD), backed by Philips and Sony, and the other was the Super Density disc (SD), supported by Toshiba and many others. Philips and Sony abandoned their MMCD format and agreed upon Toshiba's SD format with only one modification based on MMCD technology, viz EFMPlus. The unified disc format was called DVD which was marketed in 1997.
Sony introduced the MiniDisc format in 1993 as an alternative to Philips DCC or Digital Compact Cassette. Since the introduction of MiniDisc, Sony has attempted to promote its own audio compression technologies under the ATRAC brand, against the more widely used MP3. Until late 2004, Sony's Network Walkman line of digital portable music players did not support the MP3 de facto standard natively, although the provided software SonicStage would convert MP3 files into the ATRAC or ATRAC3 formats.

Sony's BRAVIA series HDTV
In 1993, Sony challenged the industry standard Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound format with a newer and more advanced proprietary motion picture digital audio format called SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound). This format employed eight channels (7.1) of audio opposed to just six used in Dolby Digital 5.1 at the time. Unlike Dolby Digital, SDDS utilized a method of backup by having mirrored arrays of bits on both sides of the film which acted as a measure of reliability in case the film was partially damaged. Ultimately, SDDS has been vastly overshadowed by the preferred DTS (Digital Theatre System) and Dolby Digital standards in the motion picture industry. SDDS was solely developed for use in the theatre circuit; Sony never intended to develop a home theatre version of SDDS.

The Slimline PlayStation 2 with controller
In 1998, Sony launched their Memory Stick format; flash memory cards for use in Sony lines of digital cameras and portable music players. It has seen little support outside of Sony's own products with Secure Digital cards (SD) commanding considerably greater popularity. This is due in part to the SD format's greater throughput (which allows faster recording and access), higher capacities, and significantly lower price per unit capacity compared to Memory Sticks available at the same time. Sony has made updates to the Memory Stick format with Memory Stick Duo and Memory Stick Micro.
In 2004, Sony built upon the MiniDisc format by releasing Hi-MD. Hi-MD allows the playback and recording of audio on newly-introduced 1 GB Hi-MD discs in addition to playback and recording on regular MiniDiscs. Recordings on the Hi-MD Walkmans can be transferred to and from the computer virtually unrestricted, unlike earlier NetMD. In addition to saving audio on the discs, Hi-MD allows the storage of computer files such as documents, videos and photos. Hi-MD introduced the ability to record CD-quality audio with a linear PCM recording feature. It was the first time since MiniDisc's introduction in 1992 that the ATRAC codec could be bypassed and lossless CD-quality audio could be recorded on the small discs.
Sony was one of the leading developers and remains one of the strongest proponents of the Blu-ray Disc optical disc format, which eventually emerged as the market leader over the competing standard, Toshiba's HD DVD, after a 2 year-long format war. The first Blu-ray players became commercially available in June 2006, and Sony's first Blu-ray player, the Sony BDP-S1, debuted in December 2006 with an MSRP of US $999.95. By the end of 2007 the format had the backing of every major motion picture studio except Universal, Paramount, and Dreamworks.[15][16][17] The Blu-ray format's popularity continued to increase, solidifying its position as the dominant HD media format, and Toshiba announced its decision to stop supporting HD DVD on 19 February 2008.

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