Sony"s current CEO Howard Stringer ignored a request to resign from his position during a stockholder"s meeting in Tokyo earlier today. Reuters reports that an apparently upset Sony shareholder "asked him to step down to allow the company to make a fresh start." According to the report Stringer ignored the comment from the shareholder although his comment was "greeted with scattered applause." Instead Stringer said that his biggest job as Sony"s CEO "was to oversee the company"s development and to nurture the next generation of management."
Stringer is still dealing with the fallout from the cyber attacks back in April that caused Sony to shut down both the Playstation Network console game service and the MMO servers of Sony Online Entertainment for several weeks. The attack exposed the personal info of tens of millions of PSN and Sony Online users. Indeed, Japanese Playstation 3 owners still cannot access PSN"s Playstation Store over two months since the cyber attack.
In today"s shareholder meeting, Stringer told the audience that the cyber attack on Sony"s servers was "because we tried to protect our IP (intellectual property), our content, in this case videogames." He added, "These are our corporate assets, and there are those that don"t want us to protect them, they want everything to be free."
In addition to the cyber attacks on Sony"s gaming networks a number of other web sites owned and operated by Sony have suffered from cyber attacks in the past couple of months. Many of those attacks were conducted by the LulzSec group which announced over the weekend that its hacking campaign has come to an end.