Since taking over as the president of Sony three years ago, an increasingly frustrated Sir Howard Stringer has mentally segregated those of his staff who “get it” from those who do not, his close colleagues say.

Those in the latter camp probably assume that a headline downsizing of 16,000 permanent and part-time workers means that the worst of the job cuts is over. They still do not get it. Come late January, that figure may feel pretty trifling relative to the full restructuring package that Sir Howard has surely been building towards since 2005.

Although yesterday’s thinly detailed “initiatives to improve profitability” may have resembled a ferocious bit of cost-slashing for the downturn, they were anything but. This was the convenient exploitation of a following wind – a hurricane that is rattling Sony’s business to the core, but which also provides the excuse the company’s first non-Japanese president has needed to jerk it out of its stupor.

That stupor has cost dearly: it may even be too late now to truly “save” the Sony that most people think of as Sony. Sir Howard may have shaken the company up with his attempt to break down “silo walls” and by ditching divisions that sat uncomfortably on the books, but, until now, he felt compelled to give the benefit of the doubt to its worst-performing divisions. These have not, as far as the outside world can tell, supplied the board with the genius or the pizzazz promised when they were allowed to live. The consumer spending crisis has now called their bluff.

Any stray whining from the Tokyo end of the business has been kept to a minimum by skewing cuts towards overseas divisions, but even then there is the sense that the Welsh-born Sir Howard has never operated without the cloying whiff of mutiny. According to one insider, when the financial crisis began to scream earlier this summer, Sony Pictures, unbidden, presented the board with a series of cost-cutting suggestions. The bigger, flabbier electronics division supposedly came up with nothing of its own.

Whatever emerges in January may turn out to be Sir Howard’s definitive strike against the “don’t get its”. It is that or accept defeat. Because this is not some trivial disagreement over whether the standby light on the PlayStation 3 should be blue or red, but a clash of culture and philosophy. It is globalisation versus insularity; it is shareholder interests versus “the Japanese way”; it is, ultimately, change versus stagnation.

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