No company wants to talk about how their system - coming in a couple of years - is going to make their current system worthless. It's a risky business. Sort-of worked for Sony at E3 2005 because they lied through their teeth. Might not work again.
(E3 2005 Sony were assholes and them getting a beat down did the console industry a lot of good. 2014 Sony are rocking hard and I don't want them to go back to the bad old days by bullshitting. "TV Reveal Tent" MS were deluded morons who got beat down hard and are now recovering their self respect. I don't want them to regress either. Come on guys, lets keep it honest.)
I am pretty sure there was a huge miscommunication between departments and executives in 2005 who also barely sat down with developers. They were too confident and everyone probably just minded their own business in isolation from the big picture due to the amazing success they enjoyed with the PS1 and PS2.
Phil Harrison wasnt a technical guy. I doubt he had an idea about the console's capabilities in practice. I doubt that he even got enough briefing. I remember an interview with one of the guys at Evolution Studio, who said that when they were shown the target renders they were asking if they "could ever do that". They were asked to create a demo and they showed something rough at a meeting Phil told them that they "were the worst guys in the world". He most likely didnt know what to really expect from the console and was in big pressure to prove that the 2005 E3 conference was the real deal.
http://kotaku.com/5082624/motorstorms-target-render-pissed-us-off-a-lot-say-devs
Jack Tretton is a PR guy. I doubt he ever got in touch with the products real life capabilities.
Ken? Ken was probably the only guy on stage who knew more. And he was a one man show during the whole process. He shot expectations over the roof regarding his brain child Cell. He probably convinced the whole company that Cell would make the PS3 a rendering power house. I think he didnt even care to sit down with the devs and see the real world performance. He wanted to sell the idea and concept of Cell to the world. Its stupid. I think Mark Cerny hinted at this lack of communication in one of his presentations.
And those CGI trailers? They probably told their marketing department to come up with something which in turn as a marketing department-(the masters of PR who's job wasnt to check technical matters) they set some marketing goals and told some CGI studios to meet them.
Sony was suffering from large compartmentalization and Ken was sitting at the top of it making his own decisions and selling the idea and promise to the rest who acted based on confidence and faith from his previous successful work. He probably wanted to caress the ears of the investors and his bosses and wasnt in touch with the real world product.
Even devs were promised better performance than what ended up in the box. I will never forget the real time demo of MGS4 and how it ended up looking at the end. It was still beautiful but in many areas it was a far cry. Looking back, MGS4's initial reveal might have been able to compete even with current gen games in some areas.
I think different departments at Sony didnt know how the product would finally perform until devs finally got their hands on the finished hardware. Its stupid.
I mean..even WE were convinced that the PS3 was going to obliterate everything...even after the price was announced we continued to vote that the PS3 was going to dominate in polls. Even if they didnt show the target renders, we were all hearing about the Cell project probably since 2001, we knew it had a BR drive, we all heard that it had a large HDD by standard, it was backwards compatible, it could even run Linux, we all expected PS exclusives to remain exclusives and carry over, we all saw the success of the PS1 and PS2. We all "fell" for it and I am sure we would fall for it no matter what. The target renders sweetened things even more.
None of this was the case with MS.
