Kutaragi Watch: PS3 failure = Promoted!

I generally loathe kotaku.com, but for once they actually had an interesting post. By now, everyone has heard about Kaz Hirai taking over Kutaragi’s position at Sony. Well, apparently Kutaragi is being maneuvered into an even higher position. Brian over at kotaku has noticed a trend which he dubs the “volcano school of management.”

Heat from bad decisions and poor management builds until a key person involved in the decision-making process is pushed up and up and up and finally ejected entirely from the company.

Hmm, sounds like Brian could be on to something, here. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. It’s sometimes easier to promote someone to higher and higher positions than to fire them, especially with high-level executive positions. Just ask Steve Ballmer.

Anyway, with the PSP just getting into its death throes and the PS3 launch being less than impressive, I can’t imagine why a failure like Kutaragi would get promoted, but Brian’s Volcano School of Management explains things pretty well, I think. It’s kind of like how bad game developers at Microsoft get “promoted” to manage things like Database Interoperability in Microsoft Excel.