Sony's Guiding Light Dies

Akio Morita, the entrepreneur, engineer and savvy salesman who helped give new meaning to the words "Made in Japan," died Sunday, Sony Corp. said. He was 78.

According to CBS News' Bryant Gumbel, the quality and global reach of Sony's products taught the U.S. a sharp lesson.

"The lesson," David Halberstam told Gumbel, "is that Americans no longer automatically make everything better than anybody else in the world, and that's a very important lesson which up to then, in post-World War II America, we had not yet accepted."

The co-founder of the company, Morita had been in failing health since a stroke in 1993. He died at a Tokyo hospital Sunday morning of pneumonia, said Sony spokesman Aldo Liguori.

Morita, co-founded Sony in a bombed-out department store after World War II. He was the last of a generation of Japanese industrialists that included carmaker Soichiro Honda and electronics rival Konosuke Matsushita.

Under Morita's guidance, Sony was instrumental in changing Japan's image from a maker of slipshod products to a world leader in high-quality automobiles and electronics. In the process, his company became a multibillion dollar conglomerate.

Morita retired as Sony's chairman in 1994. A year earlier he had suffered a stroke that left him weakened and in a wheelchair.

Morita also pioneered new behavior for corporate Japan. He pushed his engineers to take risks with new products and criticized lavishly paid American executives.

He caused a stir in 1989 by co-authoring The Japan That Can Say "No" with current Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, then refusing to authorize an English translation. In it, Morita criticized U.S. corporate culture as overindulgent.

In the late 1980s, Morita called for many of the economic reforms now being carried out by Japan's government, but he reportedly declined an offer to become foreign minister in August 1993.

Even without Morita at the helm, Sony continues to lead the world in electronics and computer entertainment. Earlier this month, the company launched a new attack on rival game makers by announcing next year's introduction of an improved version of its popular PlayStation system.

But all is not rosy at Sony.

Japan's rapidly rising yen has hurt the export-oriented company's earnings, with group net profit plunging 55 percent in the three months ending June 30.

Sony was born in 1946 when Morita, the oldest son of a rice-wine brewer, joined former Japanese navy colleague Masaru Ibuka, a fellow engineer, to start a business repairing radios on a borrowed 500 dollars.

Ibuka died in 1997 at age 89.

Using old parts and ingenuity in Japan's harsh postwar economy, they produced Japan's first magnetic recording tape and tape recorder in 1950.

They made Japan's first transistors in 1954 and Japan's first all-transistor radio in 1955.

Sony made the world's first all-transistor television in 1960 and the first home video tape recorder i 1965.

With Morita as president of Sony's U.S. subsidiary, Sony in 1970 became the first Japanese firm to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and in 1972 became one of the first Japanese companies to build a U.S. factory.

Sony began selling its Walkman personal stereo cassette players in the 1980s, and they became its most famous success.

Morita also was ready to acknowledge his occasional blunders. His best-known gaffe was the Beta VCR format. When the market for videocassette recorders was in its infancy in the early 1980s, Sony pushed its Beta recording format but lost to competitors who used the more popular VHS standard.

Morita is survived by his wife Yoshiko, two sons and a daughter. Funeral arrangements are pending.