Ventajas
The promise of the Joint Venture - the design and consumer electronics expertise of Sony married to the wireless expertise of telecom behomoth Ericsson sounded like a dream come true. Great benefits. Rank and file employees truly some of the nicest people you'll meet. And when we have a product for the US, they are among the coolest phones out there sans the iPhone.
Desventajas
SE in North America has lost some real talent in the last couple of years - a former president worked hard to recruit execs that came in from Sony, Coca Cola, etc...we guess they just got tired of not being able to achieve results - rumor had it the VP of Marketing had no budget - how do you expect to build a brand in a hyper competitive market with no budget? She left and they appointed a real flake into her role. There has been an almost yearly turnover in executives running the Product Business Unit - the group responsible for making phones - generally speaking it is almost always a Swedish national and they rotate in and out with regular frequency. Mainly, the most surprising thing is that the company does not invest in the US market. Despite protests otherwise and long speeches by every executive that "this is the year, we'll turn things around in the US" they still only manage to bring 1-2 phones to this market and most often have major quality problems with those handsets. We've heard that every year for the past 5 years. They also invest nothing in marketing or branding except for some stange reason a sponsorship with the women's tennis program. Internal politics are so thick you could cut them with a knife. People try to move around to other jobs, but the selection process mostly driven from the HR department is screwy at best. .