I think we can all agree that Sony pushed to provide us a great console that ultimately has been so far hampered by poor decisions that left Sony no choice but to initially put a console on the market that was costly for its consumers as well as Sony itself.
That's not what I fault Sony though. A company is free to charge their product at any price they deem reasonable (especially considering their losses). There is nothing arrogant about it because
for a large company, it is usually based on careful calculations and they *will* suffer/enjoy the consequences should they get it wrong. Execs don't wake up one morning and insists on a pricepoint blindly. This is a well known marketing problem (though not well studied). That's why many execs make good/bad mistakes here (e.g., recent examples I know of are Sony, Apple, Logitech). Because of what they said in the press, one can infer that both Howard Stringer and Kutaragi were aware of this fact (It's very basic marketing. Even first year marketing students will know). That said, as long as the user base is large enough and Sony has unique offerings, there is no reason why PS3 can't succeed (even now).
Where Sony falls flat big time (so far, until they show their hand) is their inability to string together all their software effort to deliver something impactful. e.g., For PS Eye, they have 1 full game, EyeCreate (like Apple's Photo Booth), 4-5 interactive screen savers only in European PSN, and even some hidden ones that are not available on any PSN yet. All these are very disjoint experiences and together they amount to almost nothing. Few people leave their PS3 on, and those who do are running Folding@Home or hosting RemotePlay. The screen savers are essentially useless.
What they could have done is to save all the resources and develop 1 full game (EOJ is good), plus a PS-Eye extension to the
core XMB and the built-in player user experience so that everyone can enjoy the convenience right away. By doing that, they layer the benefits on top of existing ones, and there is a sense of progress (rather than radiating bunch of off-shoot mini-programs and still remain status quo). I hope it's not because the XMB is done in Japan and the PS Eye team can only make small non-improvements like screen savers separately. That sort of organizational boundary should have been torned down a year or two ago.
Looking at the network, a small company like Insomniac can deliver a best of breed online gaming experiences with clan support _at launch_, while a fumbling Sony delivered a bunch of APIs that no one has used and deployed fully yet. Sure they are working on Playstation Home, which is amazing (!!!). But they need to break things down into deliverables and deal the cards out.
There are quite a few examples on how an unfocused Sony has led to PS3's stagnant image in the public's eye even though the hardware and available software is great (in my view of course).
Granted, I heard bits and pieces of goods news hinting at an amazing future, but (i) The public doesn't care, and (ii) Sony... in case you haven't heard, studies have shown that initial estimates can be off by as much as 2 times + 20% (so if you think it will take you 10 years to complete the PS3 vision, it may only be realized in 22 years). You can't wait for everything to be spit shine, all the content deals to be dotted and crossed, all the Sony devices to be developed and connected before you start to roll out.
Sony lately talked about waiting for their other devices to be ready for the video initiative. I held the exact opposite view. Do not be distracted, and do not delay the PS3 version because the Bravia and Sony-Ericsson ones are still in the works. The whole damn thing is too big. I respect Howard Stringer for what he has done, but if he is behind this school of thought, I think he should let someone else drive the project(s).
The outcome is that Sony only gets like 20-30% of the mileage for the amount of work they put in. Once (if ?) they start to repackage and regroup, they should be able to find their groove again.
I for one have not been disappointed in this generation so far. We have had great games with a slew of highly anticipated ones still on the horizon despite Sony's high price, MS's high failure rate and Nintendo's shunning of competitve visuals.
I mean who can get mad at games that have come since late 2005 or is coming out 2008 and 2009.
2006-2007-2008-2009 might go down as the golden age of gaming.
Yap ! I use PS3 every weekday.... from gaming to playing music, watching movies, browsing and now tinkering with Playstation Eye. It's a great little machine. The funny thing is I sometimes have to turn off my PS3 because I thought it has finally become more noisy. Turns out it's usually my MacBook Pro, or the spinning hard disks on my storage server (I have 720Gb now
).
EDIT: fwiw, I recently also bought a small SA-CD compatible AV/home theater set up in my office to complement my PS3. So I'm enjoying work rather much now. ;-)
