Brent Schlender thinks Sony's problem is that they are shooting for the moon.
Don't get me wrong. Sony is not run by numbskulls. There are good reasons for shooting the moon. For one thing, technology keeps morphing, and you have to keep up lest some upstart changes the rules of the game, as Microsoft did to IBM in days of yore. Then there's the natural urge to outdo the competition. And it takes a whopper of a product to goose growth when you're as big as Sony.
The problem with moon shots is that you have to get the trajectory and the timing exactly right, or you wind up lost in space. Sony, despite spending billions on Blu-ray, missed. Not by much, but by enough to call into question whether its massive investments will ever pay off as it had hoped.
Someone at Sony must have read Ralph Kramden's management book.
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Sony has a lot of problems beyond being too smart - please check out the following posts at Information Arbitrage - Sony = “Wii are in Trouble” (http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2006/11/sony_wii_are_in.html), From Inside EA: Buy Xbox 360 and/or Wii - NOT PS3 (http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2007/02/from_inside_ea_.html), EA Revisited: Playing Catch up on the Wii, Waking up to the Failure the is PS3 (http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2007/02/from_inside_ea_.html). Hope you find this stuff interesting. Culture, complacency and harvesting early success has all contributed to the problems Sony faces today. The question is: can they pull out of it in time?