"The challenge is great; success depends only on the strength of our will,"
is how Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony Corporation, concludes his
biographical book, "Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony." Sony truly is a
translation of Akio Morita's willpower and vision. Born on Jan 26, 1921 in
Nagoya, Japan, in a family of sake brewers, Morita was more interested in
brewing of technology. In 1946, he co-founded a radio repair business in a
bombed-out department store that was eventually to become Sony, a name
synonymous with innovation and quality. He came up with the name Sony after
consulting several dictionaries and creating a derivative from sonus, Latin
for sound. He first considered the name Sonny but dropped it when he realized
that in Japan, "the word `sonny' would be pronounced as `sohn-nee' which
means to lose money." This week we remember him by picking words from his
aforesaid book.