Sony spearheaded Japan's drive to be the world leader in consumer electronics, perhaps most spectacularly with the world's first pocket transistor radio, released in 1957.
Few homes are now without a humble transistor radio or a tape recorder.
Sony pioneered those, along with that apogee of mass consumer culture, the Walkman. Sony co-founder Akio Morita, who died in October, and Norio Ohga in the 1980s harnessed the coming digital revolution by creating, along with Phillips Electronics, the audio compact disc. CDs have since been joined by DVDs, ViewCams, robot dogs and entertainment in the Sony production line, along with a host of other gadgets and toys such as the PlayStation games console that have earned the Sony brand instant recognition. The company has retained its edge even as the rest of the world bemoans Japan for its supposedly unresponsive management techniques amid the worst economic downturn since the war. In the late 1980s, the shoe was on the other foot.