The Japanese electronics and media giant is not the only one to suffer electronic glitches. Microsoft has had to admit recurrent delays to its next software platform, Vista. Nor is it the first time that Sony’s marketing plans have failed to match its technological ambitions. The PlayStation 2 console was beset by manufacturing delays when it launched in 2000, but, within five years, the company had shipped 100 million consoles worldwide. In the UK at the end of last year, 8 per cent of adults and children had a PlayStation, 23 per cent had a PlayStation 2 and 6 per cent had a Microsoft Xbox.

Sony has long harboured an internal tension between its aspirations in the laboratory and its plans on the high street. Akio Morita, the co-founder, instilled a spirit of innovation at Sony, which, just a dozen years after the end of the Second World War brought out the pocket-sized radio and the transistor television. He also drove the development and the design of the Betamax videotape (he asked technicians to make it as big as a novel he was carrying in his jacket pocket) but then saw the invention marginalised by VHS. As with previous crises at the company, Sony endured and thrived. It reported 191 billion yen profits last year, thanks in part to the sale of camcorders, digital cameras and flat-screen televisions.

But coming just weeks after the exploding batteries fiasco — only 30 computers have so far caught fire, but six million Sony-made computer batteries have been recalled — the delay to the prodigal PlayStation has created a sense of crisis at the company.

The delay to the worldwide delivery of the PlayStation 3 has prompted fears of a repeat of Betamax. This time, the concern is that the Xbox will do to PlayStation what VHS did to Betamax. This is too simple an analogy: the fact is that Sony has roped in dozens of partners to PlayStation 3; Betamax foundered because it failed to strike alliances with the movie business.

Still, the problems at Sony have brought an end to Sir Howard Stringer’s honeymoon as chief executive. Stringer, the boy from Cardiff who went to the US as a young man, got drafted into the Vietnam War six weeks later, returned to his adopted land and rose to become the most successful Briton in the global media business, now has to prove himself as more than an entertainment executive and an adept corporate politician. His task is to bring together the PlayStation 3 and the Electronics businesses and to weld together the disparate parts of Sony: innovation, production and marketing.

It was a job which eluded his predecessor, Nobuyuki Idei — and he spoke Japanese and lived in Japan.

OFT failure

RAILING against regulators is generally about as pointless as shouting at baggage handlers.

That said, the Office of Fair Trading’s treatment of the London Metal Exchange does look shabby and incompetent. The Competition Appeal Tribunal scolded the OFT in scarlet terms. The OFT’s investigation into the London Metal Exchange’s plans to extend market opening hours was “superficial and flawed” and its ruling “ill-founded”. Coming so soon after blasts from both the National Audit Office and the Commons Public Accounts Committee, the OFT seriously needs to speed up and improve its procedures. John Fingleton, who arrived at the OFT last October, cannot entirely blame the old regime.

This matters because the future of the London Stock Exchange may soon sit with the OFT. Nasdaq is free to resume its hostile overtures to the Stock Exchange from next month. It is unsettling to think that the outcome of any bid for one of the most important organisations in the Square Mile could be in the hands of a regulator that, on the evidence of the LME case, does not understand how the City works.

• A government health warning for Britain’s pub and leisure industry would read: “Not smoking seriously harms you and others around you.” Scotland banned smoking in pubs this year; England and Wales are due to follow suit in 2007. Last week Rank gave warning on future earnings from the bingo business. Yesterday J D Wetherspoon reported that in
  smoke-free Scotland this summer profits were down by 11 per cent. As landlords know, this will have a knock-on effect on pub property prices. Giving up smoking promises to be a long, painful journey.

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