And Microsoft’s reply would be “no thanks”? Crooked former billionaire felon Horiemon (堀江貴文 / Takafumi Horie), disgraced former boss of Livedoor, has come out in an interview saying that Sony would be better of selling off its hardware business, including the PS3, and focusing on pursuing its true calling of producing blockbuster movies, going on to claim he was planning to buy Sony and make this so.
In reference to discussions with a fund manager, Horie has this to say:
“What was so appealing about Sony was that it has plenty of audio and visual content. It also has mobile and music hardware technology, organic electro-luminescence technology (OLED), financial products (Sony operates a bank in Japan), and FeliCa technology (smart cards).
Just what it doesn’t need are consumer electronics like TVs, it was thinking of selling them off to Chinese consumer electronics companies.
In the console market, when the going is good, it’s really good, but when it’s bad there’s a lot of risk, so I was thinking it would be better to be done with it and sell it off to Microsoft.”
Certainly an “interesting” idea, which is what the fund manager apparently said too.
He then says that at the end of 2005, prior to his arrest, he was seriously thinking about making a takeover attempt on Sony, and gives one of his now infamous financial recipes for how he might have accomplished it (not farfetched considering how close he came to controlling Fuji TV).
His motivation was apparently to “reform” Sony, and make the iPhone the axis of these reforms, combining it with Sony’s content business (which presumably would mean disposing of that worthless consumer electronics business Sony has never been any good at).
As the interviewer rather sceptically notes, he can say anything after the fact, as we have only his reputation to go by in deciding whether to trust him, though he does at least give a financially plausible takeover plan.
Incidentally, he is continuing to appeal his fraud conviction.
Interview at ITpro, via Ore-teki.
It should be said that Horiemon’s knowledge of suspect accounting practices is not matched by his gaming knowledge: eyebrows were raised when he mentioned previously on his blog that he played God of War on the Xbox (the game features only on Sony machines)… Still, he does at least have hundreds of millions of dollars to give him some strictly literal credibility.
