Not a bad article, but obviously not written by someone who has much background in Finance nor Business. Saying that "Sony has a culture where it is OK to fail" is laughable, for example. How many companies out there are widely successful? Most of product launches are so-so or fail to meet their objectives, yet you do not see companies firing everyone every 6 months. Iterations are necessary until you hopefully find a good proposition. It takes time to get a hit. Now that's no excuse for Sony to keep pushing bad products out of their chains, but of course, every company allows employees to fail at least a few times. R&D is about trial and error.<p>Then I think the author is deeply wrong about quoting iSupply as a reliable source for the cost of hardware. iSupply has NO idea of what the hardware actually costs. They simply open a parts catalog and check how much each part would be sold, one by one, and add it up. That is downright ridiculous, because when Sony buys chips for their Playstation, they tell the supplier: "Make me THIS price because I will buy 10 millions of your chips" and they have huge advantage in negociations. So, iSupply and nobody else apart from the supplier and Sony themselves know the real Bill of Materials. The rest is pure speculations.<p>And saying Sony does not care about budget and is focused on engineers only sounds false to me. If that was the case why would they produce their Playstation outside of Japan? The Playstation 1 and 2 were the examples of frequent cost reduction through their lifetime - just like the PS3 did as well, with a big step down in price from the earlier years. I am pretty sure Sony does not LOSE money on PS Vita either, and probably keep some margin there to reduce the price later. Net, they are not losing money with the Vita, and there is no need to "kill" it. They may need to further invest in it, rather, for it to become a reasonably successful machine, but I am afraid they do not have much cash to heavily support it seeing their overall financial shape.<p>Finally, showing Return of Assets alone is meaningless. You have to compare Ra from one business to another business in the same fields. Ra only makes sense in comparison.<p>Let me add as well that comparing liabilities between Software heavy companies (like Google and Microsoft) does not make ANY sense, since Google and Microsoft do not own plants and manufacture much themselves (their may businesses are advertising and second, software). It would make much more sense to compare Sony's liabilities with Panasonic, Sharp, Mitsubishi... while there is not actual company that covers the exact same range of businesses as Sony.<p>Seriously, when you have no understanding of finances, writing this kind of articles using numbers you do not understand rather makes you look like a fool.