Sony: The Outage Aftermath, Part One

Amidst increasing speculation that the three-week PSN outage has been the driving force behind a recent, mild wave of PS3 returns here and abroad, Sony CEO Howard Stringer and executive deputy president and the man himself, Kaz Hirai, have spoken on that point and a few others to the Wall Street Journal. Whilst Hirai ascertained that only a “very small percentage” of (presumably former) PS3 owners decided to cancel their PSN accounts, Sony remains future-cautious.

While Stringer was quick to praise his protégé and likely successor – “Kaz demonstrated coolness and leadership and reliability absent of disagreement and dissidence that was very impressive” – he maintained a realist point of view generally uncharacteristic of big corporations and their scared money piles: “[Security] is a never-ending process; [no-one] is 100% secure… It's the beginning, unfortunately, or the shape of things to come. It's not a brave new world; it's a bad new world.”

Analysts have estimated that the PSN and SOE outages will ultimately cost Sony as much as $1 billion.