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Ken Kutaragi is the Greatest 'emperor' Of All Time and remains SIE's only true visionary

zedinen

Member
Ken was a terrific deputy president and the worst president & CEO.

Ken was wildly successful working for a president & CEO that helped him stay grounded in reality in the 1990s.

Teruhisa Tokunaka was PlayStation president & CEO until April 1999.


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With Tokunaka gone, Ken fucked up big time due to a disconnect between his vision and Sony's reality. He got stuck within an ivory tower and the PS3 launch was a career ending disaster.


Source: Sony Corporate Report

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Radical_3d

Member
I’m not reading the deliriums of a madman that post a wall of text like this is the 90s but have my thumb up for a Kutaragi reference.
 
back in the ps3 days, they were talking about putting cell chips in toasters and crap, so a household would have multiple cell devices and they'd all leverage each other's power. ha.

and rumors that the ps3 was originally going to use 100% software rendering via the cell... then when performance targets werent being met, they thought "ok maybe just use 2 cells"... then they capitulated and threw in the nvidia gpu.

it was a wild ride, and i felt like we only got ~10% of the original vision.
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[F]
 

MrRenegade

Report me if I continue to troll
This guy was comedy gold, I swear he would just say whatever crazy shit popped into his head. Like:

"You can communicate to a new cybercity. Did you see the movie The Matrix? Same interface. Same concept. Starting from next year, you can jack into The Matrix!"

Some stuff is hard to find now but from my memory:

- something like “who ever told you PlayStation 3 is a game console? It’s a home entertainment supercomputer”

- talk about bow PS2 would support Macromedia Flash and AOL instant messenger so you could run that stuff on a second screen while you play

- talk about how you’d be able to “age” DVD movies on PS3 by copying them to the HDD, and the Cell processor would do some kind of offline upscaling and make your movies look better and better the more they aged.

- PS3 is too cheap
"They examined what Microsoft might appropriate from U.S. corporations, as American companies tend to mimic whatever is readily available."
 
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nial

Gold Member
Ken was a terrific deputy president and the worst president & CEO.

Ken was wildly successful working for a president & CEO that helped him stay grounded in reality in the 1990s.

Teruhisa Tokunaka was PlayStation president & CEO until April 1999.
Don't forget Toshio Ozawa, the first ever head of SCEI from its establishment on November 16, 1993 to March 31, 1995.
A big part of the early SCE culture came from its partial owner at the time, Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc.; from several executives of the company, to actual game producers and developers as well.
Kazunori Yamauchi came from SMEJ, and Gran Turismo started production of some kind over there.
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LordOfChaos

Member
Still wish we would have gotten the original PS3. Cell for CPU and GPU, along with three Ethernet and two HDMI ports.

Would have been horrible. As Larrabee eventually found, to make a fast GPU you don't just need cores, but the things that make GPUs fast at GPU things, ROPs, TMUs, etc

The original dual Cell PS3 plan was quickly abandoned as a bad one. It was supposed to have a Toshiba-Sony co developed GPU instead, but that had its own stumbles and then we ended up with the last minute RSX.

What I'd have wished for is a Cell combined with a GPU that didn't let it down so much that it spent the last part of its life just making up for the RSX when it was used well. I wonder what Cell + Xenos would have been like.
 
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reinking

Gold Member
Did Phil Spencer ever develop a custom 3d processor or sound chip?
We can debate about who developed what and all those meaningless accomplishments but did Ken Kutaragi ever spend 69 giggity billion dollars on a single acquisition? That sir, takes talent that many lack.
 

GAF machine

Gold Member

At the risk of being annoying, I don't know if ye got me first message but thank ye again for me Gold. I tell ye now after weeks of bad luck struck me internet just as I was wanting to respond to replies, and life matters had me busier than a bee.

Now off I go to say what I wanted.

giphy.webp
 

GAF machine

Gold Member
Full respect to Ken, but he's not "SIE's only true visionary". Cerny is also visionary.

With all due respect to Mark, his “vision” is a method. I think of him the way Kutaragi thinks of the ‘designer’ in his artist v. designer analogy...

On one side is the artist (i.e., Kutaragi) who may draw what "might not be understood by anybody for decades because they are in pursuit of truth".

On the other side is the designer (i.e., Cerny) who "must be understood by everybody. They must understand the era in which they live in and manufacture things that meet the needs of the times. They ponder what is the best way to use the products comfortably".

CELL was a work of art born out of true vision, pursued behind walls that guarded greater understanding. Some viewed/view it as a cleverly crafted thing of beauty, others a senseless monstrosity.

Cerny's “vision” (i.e., method) is limited to pondering over x86-64 APUs for the reason Kutaragi stated, then referring to CELL for GPU, audio and storage customization as a way to make budget-conscious consoles more performant.
 
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GAF machine

Gold Member
The man is such a visionary he created the most obtuse console in history for literally no reason that was so notoriously difficult to work with it damn near killed Playstation. PS3-era Sony was a disaster.

Mark Cerny is the true visionary.

PS2 was also notoriously difficult to work with early in its lifecycle. Asking $600 for a ~$1060 console is what bled PlayStation, not PS3 development woes.

Grabbing an x86-64 chipset from the bargain bin to make a "supercharged PC architecture" that heavily leans on PS3 (e.g., the SPU Runtime System) for its performance doesn't make Cerny a true visionary. It just makes him resourceful.

He's so resourceful that he “casually asked a very famous director at one point” (i.e., Kutaragi) what he thought SIE should do for PS4 Pro. A true visionary would’ve just got on with it, without consulting the guy who “CrEaTeD ThE MoSt oBtUsE CoNsOlE In hIsToRy fOr lItErAlLy nO ReAsOn”.
 

GAF machine

Gold Member
The dude almost sunk PlayStation and Sony with the Cell CPU for PS3, but okay...

Still almost killed Playstation in the pivotal moment where online playing was getting massive on console. I doubt he sacrificed anything on purpose.

Untill he almost killed the brand with the PS3. And all that Technological success is BS, thers a reason PS4 and PS5 abandoned that exotic architecture. If devs are not able to extract the power of your hardware, you already failed.
NaughtyDog said developing for PS3 was like solving a Rubix Cube, and they were one of the few that bothered extracting the power the console had to offer.

Almost doesn't count.

The same PS3 blamed for almost sinking or killing the brand is the same PS3 that Cerny/SIE pulls from to buoy the performance and extend the life of the brands consoles.

PS4 and PS5 didn't abandon exotic architecture. They simply swapped one form of exotic for another that leverages concepts PS3 pioneered (e.g., asynchronous compute engines). Devs who want to extract the most out of PS4 and PS5 still need to solve a Rubix Cube. Case in quote:

"There are a lot of hidden powers in our system. You may be familiar with GPGPU and PS4 has a lot more GPGPU processing in it, which is difficult to learn and master, similar to a Cell processor." -- Shuhei Yoshida

PS3 made SIE's engineers, tech groups, studios and therefore the PS brand stronger.
 
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Almost doesn't count.

The same PS3 blamed for almost sinking or killing the brand is the same PS3 that Cerny/SIE pulls from to buoy the performance and extend the life of the brands consoles.

PS4 and PS5 didn't abandon exotic architecture. They simply swapped one form of exotic for another that leverages concepts PS3 pioneered (e.g., asynchronous compute engines). Devs who want to extract the most out of PS4 and PS5 still need to solve a Rubix Cube. Case in quote:

"There are a lot of hidden powers in our system. You may be familiar with GPGPU and PS4 has a lot more GPGPU processing in it, which is difficult to learn and master, similar to a Cell processor." -- Shuhei Yoshida

PS3 made SIE's engineers, tech groups, studios and therefore the PS brand stronger.
Dreams and The Tomorrow Children are 2 highly GPGPU-driven games.

They wouldn't have been possible with a conventional rendering pipeline...
 

GAF machine

Gold Member
This guy was comedy gold, I swear he would just say whatever crazy shit popped into his head. Like:

"You can communicate to a new cybercity. Did you see the movie The Matrix? Same interface. Same concept. Starting from next year, you can jack into The Matrix!"

Some stuff is hard to find now but from my memory:

- something like “who ever told you PlayStation 3 is a game console? It’s a home entertainment supercomputer”

- talk about bow PS2 would support Macromedia Flash and AOL instant messenger so you could run that stuff on a second screen while you play

- talk about how you’d be able to “age” DVD movies on PS3 by copying them to the HDD, and the Cell processor would do some kind of offline upscaling and make your movies look better and better the more they aged.

- PS3 is too cheap

- His Matrix reference was an oversimplified analogy. The Opertaor (the player) uses a console (uses a console) to jack (to access) into The Matrix (an online destination where people interface with people and programs (games and other content) in cyberspace, e.g., PSN).

- His point about PS3 being a supercomputer in the home was that it (specifically CELL) shared attributes with supercomputers (i.e., parallelism with high floating point performance) and was made for distributed computing on home networks.

- Nothing is “crazy” about previewing PS2 running Macromedia and AOl at E3, or the thought of uploading content ripped from DVDs to CELL Storage servers that upconvert SD video to HD over time (”ageing”) by analyzing and extracting pixel information.

- PS3 was too cheap... for Sony/SIE to make a profit or break even on day one.
 
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GAF machine

Gold Member
back in the ps3 days, they were talking about putting cell chips in toasters and crap, so a household would have multiple cell devices and they'd all leverage each other's power. ha.

and rumors that the ps3 was originally going to use 100% software rendering via the cell... then when performance targets werent being met, they thought "ok maybe just use 2 cells"... then they capitulated and threw in the nvidia gpu.

Only silly people thought CELL would be in toasters. It wasn't made to suit kitchen appliances. It was made to suit networked appliances purpose-built to process and display media.

Rumors about PS3 originally using two CELLs for 100% software rendering were false. The plan was always for PS3 to have a GPU. Toshiba fabbed it (a 1GHz, 16MB eDRAM GPU per a SCE programmer) but couldn't produce it at the desired yields, so Plan B was to see if one CELL could do the job. Once it was determined that "there were differences between the Cell to be used as a computer chip and as a shader" and that trying to use CELL solely as a GPU was "a real waste" of the chip's capabilities, Kutaragi chose to go with Nvidia.
 
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1) "You can communicate to a new cybercity. Did you see the movie The Matrix? Same interface. Same concept. Starting from next year, you can jack into The Matrix!"

2) - talk about how you’d be able to “age” DVD movies on PS3 by copying them to the HDD, and the Cell processor would do some kind of offline upscaling and make your movies look better and better the more they aged.

3) - PS3 is too cheap
1) Metaverse. We know it's coming, we just don't know by whom. PSN and PS Home (RIP) are indicative of Ken's cyber-connected vision.

2) Sounds awfully similar to nVidia's DLSS-style solution for AI video upscaling, don't you think?


3) Technically speaking it was very cheap for what it offered:

playstation_3_bill_of_materials.jpg


Of course that won't get you very far if the plebs don't understand your vision... let alone when your hardware has a very immature software stack that cannot demonstrate the hardware's benefits.

I'd argue Crazy Ken was way too far ahead of his time for his own good. His vision was extremely similar to Leather Jacket Man™, but nVidia has had far better execution so far (that's why their market cap is worth over 3 trillion $, while Sony is barely worth 100 billion $).

He clearly wanted Sony to become something bigger by using the PS3 as a trojan horse... who knows, maybe in a parallel universe Sony is worth 3 trillion $ and CUDA never took off.
 

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
1) Metaverse. We know it's coming, we just don't know by whom. PSN and PS Home (RIP) are indicative of Ken's cyber-connected vision.

2) Sounds awfully similar to nVidia's DLSS-style solution for AI video upscaling, don't you think?


3) Technically speaking it was very cheap for what it offered:

playstation_3_bill_of_materials.jpg


Of course that won't get you very far if the plebs don't understand your vision... let alone when your hardware has a very immature software stack that cannot demonstrate the hardware's benefits.

I'd argue Crazy Ken was way too far ahead of his time for his own good. His vision was extremely similar to Leather Jacket Man™, but nVidia has had far better execution so far (that's why their market cap is worth over 3 trillion $, while Sony is barely worth 100 billion $).

He clearly wanted Sony to become something bigger by using the PS3 as a trojan horse... who knows, maybe in a parallel universe Sony is worth 3 trillion $ and CUDA never took off.
man what the hell are you guys smoking?

What made those claims crazy is that they were made about the PS2 and PS3. Crazy Ken Kutaragi didn’t invent the idea of the Metaverse or video upscaling. He just talked about PS2/PS3 doing those things when they didn’t.

I’m not going to suck his dick and give him credit for DLSS just because he lied and said that PS3 would do offline DVD upscaling, sorry.
 

A.Romero

Member
I love Kutaragi.

I do agree he was a visionary. His persistence created Playstation and ended the lock Nintendo had on game development.

He was the one that first noticed (or at least decided to exploit) the market for older gamers. IMO he created the modern gaming landscape.

His failures at the end were just the result of having an engineer at the front of the company. He fucked up good but his later career failures don't erase what he managed to acomplish in his earlier years.
 

GAF machine

Gold Member
I love Kutaragi.

I do agree he was a visionary. His persistence created Playstation and ended the lock Nintendo had on game development.

He was the one that first noticed (or at least decided to exploit) the market for older gamers. IMO he created the modern gaming landscape.

His failures at the end were just the result of having an engineer at the front of the company. He fucked up good but his later career failures don't erase what he managed to acomplish in his earlier years.

"As well as being an engineer, I have been involved in the business side of things for many years. I helped start the company, and I have always been involved in business decisions". -- Ken Kutaragi
 
man what the hell are you guys smoking?

What made those claims crazy is that they were made about the PS2 and PS3. Crazy Ken Kutaragi didn’t invent the idea of the Metaverse or video upscaling. He just talked about PS2/PS3 doing those things when they didn’t.

I’m not going to suck his dick and give him credit for DLSS just because he lied and said that PS3 would do offline DVD upscaling, sorry.
Thanks for proving my point:
Of course that won't get you very far if the plebs don't understand your vision... let alone when your hardware has a very immature software stack that cannot demonstrate the hardware's benefits.
We also know (according to Cerny) that the PS5 is fully capable to use custom/personalized HRTF profiles by analyzing a photo of your ears (this would probably require a cloud AI backend that costs tons of money):


Does that mean it's not technically possible, just because Sony hasn't delivered this feature yet?

What are you gonna say when nVidia delivers this feature first in the market? That Sony or Cerny was "wrong"?

Some things would be very different if we didn't have all these financial meltdowns (Lehman Brothers back in 2008-2009 and COVID craziness in 2020-2021).

Companies/investors are forced to do cutbacks and then engineers do not have the necessary capital to fulfill their vision.

nVidia does have the necessary cloud AI backend to deliver a lot of things.
 

A.Romero

Member
"As well as being an engineer, I have been involved in the business side of things for many years. I helped start the company, and I have always been involved in business decisions". -- Ken Kutaragi
He helped starting the division but not the company, I guess it was a translation error.

As I said, he accomplished a lot and the net result was positive but hard not to see he dropped the ball on the PS3.
 

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
Thanks for proving my point:

We also know (according to Cerny) that the PS5 is fully capable to use custom/personalized HRTF profiles by analyzing a photo of your ears (this would probably require a cloud AI backend that costs tons of money):


Does that mean it's not technically possible, just because Sony hasn't delivered this feature yet?

What are you gonna say when nVidia delivers this feature first in the market? That Sony or Cerny was "wrong"?

Some things would be very different if we didn't have all these financial meltdowns (Lehman Brothers back in 2008-2009 and COVID craziness in 2020-2021).

Companies/investors are forced to do cutbacks and then engineers do not have the necessary capital to fulfill their vision.

nVidia does have the necessary cloud AI backend to deliver a lot of things.
Ok whatever. This would be like:

2020: Phil Spencer claims that Xbox Series X will make Star Trek’s Holodeck a reality

2040: Nvidia releases an actual Holodeck

Phil Spencer’s husbandos: “HA you laughed at Phil in 2020 but here we are and Nvidia made something that’s kinda similar to what Phil said XSX was gonna do, that just shows how visionary and ahead of his time Phil was. XSX would’ve done it first if only MS didn’t cut their budget.”
 

GAF machine

Gold Member
Don't forget Toshio Ozawa, the first ever head of SCEI from its establishment on November 16, 1993 to March 31, 1995.
A big part of the early SCE culture came from its partial owner at the time, Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc.; from several executives of the company, to actual game producers and developers as well.
Kazunori Yamauchi came from SMEJ, and Gran Turismo started production of some kind over there.
G397uTj.png

Kutaragi is one of SCEI's founders, so the company’s culture was partly of his making. Ozawa was mainly a titular head. Shuji Utsumi (VP of product acquisition at the time) divulged that once Kutaragi got approval from Norio Ohga to create PS1 "Ken’s career went from almost zero [to essentially running Sony Computer Entertainment]."

Shigeo Murayama (SCEI Chairman, previous SMEJ CEO) disclosed that his role was simply to setup a "comfortable working environment" for him, and maintains that Kutaragi was "the engine behind it all".

At least for PS1, he gets credit for hardware, but everything related to content involves a lot of corporate operations that have many different people at the helm (like heads of publisher relations).

Kutaragi gets credit for more than PS1's hardware. Here he is in his own words...

"Yes, I was the starting engineer, and many times I have been called the "father of PlayStation". But I also work in the software department, so I have also been involved with the hiring of people for Sony's software development — and this has been ongoing since the PlayStation design was finished".

"As well as being an engineer, I have been involved in the business side of things for many years. I helped start the company, and I have always been involved in business decisions".


I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that one of the business decisions he was involved in was setting PS1's price at $299. Kutaragi was the mind and muscle behind SCEI's operations from the start.

Ken Kutaragi was a great engineer, but a shit CEO.
He got there in April 1999 when all the planning leading to the launch of the PS2 was already done, PS3 was his baby on all fronts and no one was there to stop him. Nobuyuki Idei and Sir Howard Stringer (heads of main Sony at 1998; 2005) probably didn't care enough to do anything.

Nope. Kutaragi handled PS2’s planning from start to finish...

'That freedom of initiative has continued with the development of PS2. Sony president Nobuyuki Idei didn't see a solid plan for the machine until just a few weeks before its development was announced in March 1999. "Nobody in top management knew what we were up to," says Kutaragi. In fact, he had started working on PS2 as soon as the first-generation PlayStations were being unpacked from their boxes. He called together a few dozen engineers from all over the world, including Toshiba's team, to a secret meeting in the city of Ito in 1996. There, Kutaragi divulged his dream of turning PlayStation into a platform for connecting an increasingly wired world.' -- Time

I know you think he did a lot more harm than good, but you can at least be factual.
 
Ok whatever. This would be like:

2020: Phil Spencer claims that Xbox Series X will make Star Trek’s Holodeck a reality

2040: Nvidia releases an actual Holodeck

Phil Spencer’s husbandos: “HA you laughed at Phil in 2020 but here we are and Nvidia made something that’s kinda similar to what Phil said XSX was gonna do, that just shows how visionary and ahead of his time Phil was. XSX would’ve done it first if only MS didn’t cut their budget.”
Phil Spencer is not a visionary, nor an engineer.

He's a corporate muppet at best.
 

GAF machine

Gold Member
Ken was a terrific deputy president and the worst president & CEO.

The worst president and CEO, yet Kaz Hirai credited him with building SIE into an empire? Yeah, okay.

Ken was wildly successful working for a president & CEO that helped him stay grounded in reality in the 1990s.

Tokunaka helped him stay grounded?

Former executive Makoto Iwai shared a story that portayed Kutaragi as a shot caller. It ended with him saying: "He was using Terry Tokunaka or [Shigeo] Maruyama-san, who were supposed to be his bosses, just like they were servants,"

With Tokunaka gone, Ken fucked up big time due to a disconnect between his vision and Sony's reality.

What disconnect?...


He got stuck within an ivory tower and the PS3 launch was a career ending disaster.


QzEUfp9.jpeg

As the story goes, he was stuck inside that same ivory tower when he made PS1 and PS2...

'In 1992, Ohashi (who died in 1996) went looking for a customer. A former Toshiba engineer who had moved to Sony proposed that he meet Kutaragi. "We started talking about the future," Kutaragi says. "And I persuaded Ohashi to create the chip for us." Toshiba and Sony had collaborated before, on the DVD format and other ventures. But this tie-up was special, helping Sony develop a key product and boosting Toshiba's chip-making operation. Kutaragi and Ohashi initiated a partnership akin to a marriage without a license. The engineers collaborated for years before the two companies formally agreed that Toshiba would supply chips to Sony for its PlayStation.

That freedom of initiative has continued with the development of PS2.
Sony president Nobuyuki Idei didn't see a solid plan for the machine until just a few weeks before its development was announced in March 1999. "Nobody in top management knew what we were up to," says Kutaragi.'


You’re stuck on P&L, and for the second time PS3's launch didn't end Kutaragi's career. What you hold up as losses he considered an 'investment'. Everything PS3 related in the OP is an ROI.
 

GAF machine

Gold Member
A quote from J Allard (former Xbox vice president) back in the day:

Poor him if he thinks he forced Kutaragi to resign.

He was three-and-out before J. Allard knew what a PlayStation was.

Here’s the quick play-by-play of Kutaragi’s career from one of his “bosses”...

"When the original PlayStation was being manufactured and getting ready to ship, he was already meeting with the staff about his vision for PlayStation 2. Then before PlayStation 2 was released, he was already working on PlayStation 3. So when PlayStation 3 was getting ready to ship, I asked him, “So, what’s your plan for PlayStation 4?” And his response was, “[PlayStation 4] is not my responsibility.” -- Shigeo Maruyama
 
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