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To: Seeker of Truth who wrote (1999)	10/3/1999 4:13:00 PM
From: swisstrader	Respond to of 6020

Sadly, Sony's Morita dies.... Sony's Morita, Who Gave World The Walkman, Dies By Edwina Gibbs Oct 3 10:16am ET TOKYO (Reuters) - Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony Corp and the man who gave the world the Walkman, died Sunday of pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital, the company said. He was 78. Morita was responsible for some of Sony's most successful innovations, was its marketing mastermind and a high-profile envoy for Japan Inc at the peak of its global presence in the 1980s. The heir to one of Japan's oldest sake-brewing families, Morita declined to take over the family business and, together with inventor Masaru Ibuka, in 1946 founded the firm that was to become a world electronic and entertainment giant. First called Tokyo Tsushin Denki, the company was rechristened ``Sony' -- from the Latin ``sonus' for sound -- in 1958. ``We wanted a new name that could be recognized anywhere in the world, one that could be pronounced the same in any language,' Morita wrote in his book ``Made in Japan.' A STRING OF INNOVATIONS Sony then went on to invent and market a host of household consumer products, introducing stereo into Japan and inventing the Trinitron system, a method of projecting color images onto a television tube. The firm also built the world's first video cassette recorder for home use, the Betamax, a product now remembered as the loser in a marketing battle with rival Matsushita's VHS brand. Morita's most famous brainchild, the Walkman, first appeared in 1979 after he overrode opposition from those within his own company who saw no future for the product. In 1989, Sony made world headlines with its $3.4 billion buyout of Columbia Pictures, an ill-starred investment which failed to deliver on its promise. Morita -- an energetic charmer easily recognized by his full tuft of silky white hair -- was a key player in trying to smooth often testy U.S-Japan economic ties. He helped General Motors in its talks on buying 35 percent of truckmaker Isuzu in the early 1970s. STAUNCHLY PROUD OF BEING JAPANESE But Morita was also staunchly proud of being Japanese and encouraged his countrymen to rid themselves of their inferiority complex toward the United States. He made a point of flying the Japanese flag outside Sony's U.S. showroom on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He also co-authored the book ``The Japan That Can Say No,' with nationalist politician Shintaro Ishihara, now the governor of Tokyo. The book's key premise, developed by Ishihara, called for Japan to stop following Washington's lead on global issues while Morita berated U.S. managers for being to focused on short-term profits and not being more patient in creating markets. Morita later distanced himself from the work, having his portion removed from the English translation. A CHAMPION OF THE WORKERS A ceaseless explainer of the gaps between Japanese and U.S. business styles, he advocated traditional Japanese values such as job security. ``Who owns a company anyway? Is it the managers, the shareholders or the workers?,' he wrote. ``In Japan, we feel that the company must be as much concerned with the workers as the shareholders.' That is an ideal that Sony appears not to have abandoned. Although the company has unveiled a plan to cut 17,000 jobs over the next four years, most of the cuts will come through natural attrition. Morita, who became the president of Sony in 1971 and chairman in 1976, suffered a stroke in late 1993 while playing tennis and withdrew from business and public activities.