jarrod said:
Saying iPod's just now "hitting it's stride" after 3 years on market is a little disingenous.
I count anything as "hitting its stride" the moment sales picks up at a rapid pace and can keep that growth for a decent period. This would even apply to much lower sales in an industry where total sales are much smaller--the strides are not as big as in other markets, but are still proportionately strong in its own. And it certainly doesn't care how long it's been on the market; an item could lull for a decade, and yet if it suddenly gets picked up after that point and goes on a great selling stretch it his still started to stride.
Of course no company would WANT to follow that kind of business model, and it certainly flavors the whole gameplan. But that's still not the point; we're talking about what the portable market looks like NOW, not three years ago.
"Right now" Xbox is also outselling PS2 in key markets, but that doesn't change the larger picture for either platform much. PS2 is around 75M while Xbox sits around 16M and GBA is around 56M while iPod has yet to crack 10M.
Looking at the larger picture makes sense in some ways, but not overriding sense--especially when we're looking at new new endeavors into potentially new markets, and gauging them against all the products available (and to be available) in that area.
Back to your Xbox example, just how often does the hypothetical situation come up about how it would compare if it launched alongside the PS2, or shortly thereafter rather than trailing by 20 months? Change one factor and everyone starts massively re-estimating all over again. It's easy to look at performance after the fact and determine factors, but how well can you determine future performance based on that? Who would have looked at the iPod before 2001--or even up through its first year--and remotely seen how it would be selling now, and how recognizable an icon it has become?
Which is why in my view attaching any simple,
reasonable price to a device and saying "it won't sell" is a bunch of hooey. How many people have said "no protable console that costs more than the magic number $100 will sell" and have completely backslid in regards to the DS--which is born out by the massive pre-ordering, excitement, and sales projections in the industry?
The market continually shifts. At this point, I feel the relative success of a device like the PSP depends MUCH more on how the whole package is handled than saying "$200 is right out." Anymore, that's completely unsupportable. It's just a step up from its closest competitor, and in the portable device market in general, in many ways it's a step down.
DS is going to be extremely supply restricted for the first 6 months at the least, and in the west it's being aimed at an older market as complimentary rather than supplementary to GBA.
...and yet that doesn't change the fact that it's here NOW, and anyone who has the inclination to pick it up will simply wait for the DS's availability. Why pick up a GBA if you
want a DS, and owning one will make most of your GBA use superfluous? If Nintendo developed more and stronger use of the GBA link or lowers the price so that there's a wider gulf to cross it would be a different situation, but as it stands now many customers will do the "next generation is right around the corner so I'll wait." I certainly don't feel any urge to pick up new top-end video cards if the next generation is under six months away, or feel like buying another computer on AGP while I know that PCI-Express is the way everyone is turning to now... Despite Nintendo's desires, the DS does not become complimentary if they give it the capacity to do what the vast bulk of people buy a GBA for--to play GBA games. It becomes predatory. The question is what steps they can take to keep the GBA more appealing in comparison.
For reference my information on GBA ouselling various other consumer electronics comes from a SCEI slide presentation last spring (in preperation for PSP). I'm not sure where Sony got their figures though I read it to mean lifetime sales (they didn't seperate GBA out from the GB line irrc).
Lifetime sales trends tend to be hard to quantify, hard to track properly--especially all associated traits (relative retail price across all the models represented and price shifts over time, profitability, timespan, regional effects...), and hard to use as a measuring stick for current market trends. Or else you start saying how much more successful MD players have been than the GBA, since they've sold over 80 million units to date. ("Units" itself being up to interpretation where many products are concerned, which leaves the data especially hard to measure.)
Thems the breaks.
