Sony has been shit for much longer than 20 years, kiddo.

It's interesting. I did a quick search, and couldn't quickly find many complaints about them before 2000, but technical people complained a lot about Sony products back then. The biggest complaint was that Sony did everything themselves. So, every component inside a piece of electronic equipment was made by Sony, and every time they could get away with it, it would have a custom footprint or custom specs, so that it was impossible to find replacement parts without getting them directly from Sony at huge markups.