VAIO Corporation
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Formerly called
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Sony Vaio |
|---|---|
| Private | |
| Industry | Laptop, Smartphone |
| Successor | Japan Industrial Partners |
| Founded | 1996 |
| Headquarters | Japan |
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Area served
|
Worldwide |
| Products | Laptop, Smartphone |
| Owner |
Japan Industrial Partners (95%) Sony (5%) |
| Parent | Sony (1996-2014) |
| Website | Japan www United States us Brazil br Chile cl |
VAIO Corporation (/ˈvaɪ.oʊ/ standing for Visual Audio Intelligent Organizer), which is headquartered in Azumino, Nagano in Japan, is a manufacturer of personal computers. VAIO was originally a brand of Sony Corporation, introduced in 1996. Sony sold its PC business to the investment firm Japan Industrial Partners in February 2014 as part of a restructuring effort to focus on mobile devices. Sony maintains a minority stake in the new, independent company, which currently sells computers in the United States, Japan, and Brazil as well as an exclusive marketing agreement. Sony still holds the copyright trademarks for the VAIO brand and logo. Currently in the US, VAIO products are sold by Trans Cosmos America, Inc.
Originally an acronym of Video Audio Integrated Operation, this was amended to Visual Audio Intelligent Organizer in 2008 to celebrate the brand's 10th anniversary. The logo concept was created by Teiyu Goto, supervisor of product design from the Sony Creative Center in Tokyo. He incorporated many meanings into the logo and acronym: the pronunciation is similar to "bio", which is symbolic of life and the product's future evolution; it's also near "violet", which is why most early Vaios were purple or included purple components. Additionally, the logo is stylized to make the "VA" look like a sine wave and the "IO" like binary digits 1 and 0, the combination representing the merging of analog and digital signals. The sound some Vaio models make when starting up is derived from the melody created when pressing a telephone keypad to spell the letters V-A-I-O.
Although Sony made computers in the 1980s exclusively for the Japanese market, the company withdrew from the computer business around the beginning of the 1990s. Sony's re-entry into the global computer market, under the new Vaio brand, began in 1996 with the PCV series of desktops—the PCV-90 was designed with a 3D graphical interface as a novelty for new users. The first generation of Vaio laptop computers was released in 1997 and the US$2,000 PCG-505 model was designed to be "SuperSlim," and was kept in a four-panel magnesium body.
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