I actually find it pretty remarkable that the 360 is still on an upward trend. Every year they sell more console's then the year before. While they have never had that breakout that the, Wii, PS2 and PS1 had they have steadily, in constant competition with the Wii on one side and the PS3 on the other, continued to expand their userbase, improve their product and generate an ever-increasing amount of revenue both for themselves and their business partners.
It's because their platform strategy is sound, they keep on top of daily execution, and do a lot of things right from the consumers' perspective. The end effect a platform holder wants to achieve is to lower customer acquisition cost continuously by stacking values, and customer referrals.
They adopt the tried-and-true market share first platform strategy. The online mechanism allows players to rope in their gamer friends easily and smoothly (It generates multiplier effects). They also ensure that key titles work best on their platform. Most importantly, they spent *a lot* of money marketing the brand, and making sure it shines. $500 million this fall is spent on Kinect alone ? During this shopping season, they also spend marketing dollars on discounts to boost their software sales number (It generates positive vibes for other gamers to see, and also make up $$$ spent via volume sales).
It's the exemplary American software platform strategy, extremely suitable for US's homogenous marketplace. But you need lots of $$$ upfront.
For Sony, they take the profit first strategy, and don't do any active management of perception and brand. As a result, you see the sales number bob up and down based on their daily execution. There is little or no marketing umbrella to sugar coat the services. Their marketing budget is very small compared to Microsoft. This is not a huge problem in the short term, but have serious long term implications.
They also create first parties content to generate exclusive value. But unlike a platform strategy, there is no multiplier effect in title business (May not lower customer acquisition cost consistently). You have to earn sales one title at a time unless you hit a jackpot (like COD). Basically, from the consumer perspective, Playstation is largely a content business for Sony, not necessarily a platform business (This is not true of course, but the first parties and Blu-ray are the main draw nonetheless).
When Sony deal with their customers, they are also a lot more haphazard in execution. Instead of tying everything back to one thing, Sony has Playstation Plus, Playstation Reward, Playstation Network. They also have video presentations like Qore and Pulse doing essentially the same thing (The free one dilutes the paid one >_<). The services are not coherent at all even after the Playstation Network survey months ago. Nice things were surveyed or demoed but very few made it out into real products. Yet strange services like Life with Playstation channels made it out for silly one-off placement deal ?
Because these services are not stacked and "closed loop", the network effect is gone, small profits are eaten up by the cost, people are (well, I am) confused. Instead of focusing on 1-2 big platform strategies, the team wasted a lot of effort doing tactical things for little benefits. Their software team is too small for so many different effort. I blame the top execs for allowing this to happen. I am thankful for the free online gaming services, the Playstation games, the media services, and Blu-ray. I am confused by the rest. ^_^ Playstation Home is somewhere in between, but could be bigger.
As for Nintendo, they are doing fine. They are a victim of the press' desire to find a story. *In general* I think the gaming press is the parasite of the gaming industry. I don't see much value add, or journalism there. Most of them read like a personal blog or forum post. >_< They need to grow up.
