Effectively, Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment are about as related as Virgin Airlines and Virgin Mobile. Think of Sony (and any conglomerate in general) not as a parent company per se, but more like a VC firm or a majority-shareholder mutual fund; the executives of the Sony conglomerate don't really have any more insight into the component companies than those companies' other shareholders do. The only way business-process insight is going to be spread between the component companies is if the executives of one happen to read the trade press of the other.
Eh, if I am a majority shareholder then I will read the riot act to the company I hold a majority in after they lose $171M on shitty security. Also, http://www.sony.com/SCA/who-we-are/our-businesses.shtml lists all these so there is some cohesion. AFAIK there's no such Virgin supercompany.
Richard Branson is Virgin's sole-proprietor supercompany. :)
But yes, that's true—the investors would be mad at SCE. But would that, in turn, make them think of pulling aside SPE to give them the same talk? SPE isn't even doing anything involving running a public-facing web service; why would the investors presume they'd be at risk? It'd be like YCombinator calling in all their current batch of startups to give them a lesson on finances because one of them screwed up their bookkeeping.
>It'd be like YCombinator calling in all their current batch of startups to give them a lesson on finances because one of them screwed up their bookkeeping. //
If they "screw up" was criminally negligent and had a cost of the order of $100s of millions I could certainly see YC doing that, couldn't you?
Virgin Group Ltd. is the "supercompany", but you are right that there's a big difference: Virgin Group owns the brand, and holds positions in many Virgin companies, and majority positions in some, but many others have been divested entirely and uses the brand solely under license.
