Should Sony have waited with PS4 Pro?

Phil Spencer publically talking about Xbox console "updates" and blurring the line between generations predates any Sony Neo info by nearly a month (Kotaku leak was just after GDC 16)...
http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/1/11121666/xbox-one-hardware-upgrades-phil-spencer-microsoft
http://kotaku.com/sources-sony-is-working-on-a-ps4-5-1765723053

Project Scorpio is in no way shape or form a "response" or "reaction" to PS4 Pro

 

Just to add to my point:

 

And the company is going to build an entire strategy around unverified rumours?

Not saying it's impossible. But once again, within a couple months of the leaked rumours Scorpio is announced at E3. Somehow Phil was able to manage building a business case, acquire funding, a delivery date and specs for Scorpio within a couple of months off unverified rumours?

Feels like a stretch to me. I'm open to new ideas, but we will need your thought process of how this played out.

Remember these are the same guys that released game pass, elite controller, new controllers, Play anywhere, black ops 2, free sync 2.0 with 0 lead up to announcement. For black ops 2 and freesync they flat out lied whether it was coming or not.

So to me, timing of messaging doesn't seem like a good reason to believe it wasn't already in the works. The leaks does indicate a good reason to let people know what you're working on.

 

That was 5 months after Masayasu Ito of Sony talked to Japanese media about a possible upgrade model for PS4 in Oct. 2015
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/news-rumours-playstation-4-orbis-spin.53566/page-282#post-1880159

 

But that is all many years after Xbox One is designed and developed with Hypervisor and VMs which just screams planned for hardware upgrades.

 

This requires way too many assumptions to consider this interview a strong link and you're conveniently ignoring the XBOX side of the story.
Once again, a 'possible' upgrade model could mean _anything_ and also mean _nothing_ at all.

MS has a weaker console and they have data on their own customer base.
MS had been on an entire journey of rebuilding their brand since launch.
Removing Kinect and steering away from TV.
With each progressive E3, XBOX has been moving back towards gaming.
Phil Spencer talks about iterative consoles.
We know that MS had been working on 2 consoles in parallel.
MS officially announced their XBO One S
MS then officially announces 1 hour later, Scorpio, and sets a date for it's release in holiday 2017.

at this point in time:
There is no official news on PS4 Slim or PS4 Pro.
There are no official specs on PS4 Slim or PS4 Pro.
Neither would be officially announced in any capacity until Sept of later that year.

MS is still working blind, it's pretty clear that they did not build a business case off unofficial specs and rumours about Sony's console.
We have a _FULL_ render of the board.
We see 12 GBs of RAM.
we calculated the 384 BUS
Very little had changed from that render, to the reveal, intact nothing has changed except some markings on the board.

So you're telling me between Oct 2015 - June 2016, they managed to
a) build a case off a Sony interview
b) go to Satya and convince him that this is where XBOX needs to go because Sony is going there
c) get funding
d) talk with all developers about what they need to do to beat Sony's box? nothing about 4K... nothing about resolution gate... no... that's not something they have a problem with.
e) then profile all the XBO games and figure out what they need hardware wise to beat Sony
f) create their board render and specs and have them ready to go
all in 9 months?

Common. Be real here. Most hardware companies have a great deal of many SKUs being built and designed all in parallel, each one has a different release date.
MS didn't get this far being that incompetent, their company would be nearly dead or the luckiest company in the world to react so late and have such solutions on tap.
Considering the size of MS, it's amazing that they'd be able to iterate faster and bigger than most agile companies if all of this were to be believed; I get that you're paranoid about MS and defensive about Sony, but MS being able to react like this and this swiftly is frankly giving them way too much credit.
Like way too much credit.
This is unheard of level of speed and precision for a corporation this size.

You clearly do not know the shit show leading up to the launch of XBO. You want to see a rushed MS? There's a power brick sitting outside OG Xbox One for a reason.

and then... well there's this interview that just released today:

 

I honestly can't remember why they decided to run two VM (GameOS & AppOS) on their hardware, on top for their SystemOS.

 

faster iteration for the OS, and be able to package drivers and API with each game; overall better for compatibility and flexibility.

 

I'm not sure why hypervisor is such a big deal.
https://rdist.root.org/2010/01/27/how-the-ps3-hypervisor-was-hacked/

 

It's the VMs that's the big deal.

 

OK, anyway it's useful not only for mid-gen upgrade but also for next-gen upgrade. And VMs are useful for security. The capability is there, but how they use it depends on their business decision.

Please don't put words in my mouse, I don't follow mpg1's original argument and merely pointing out the known facts related to the comment of Ike Turner. If I have one thing to add, it's just that why Scorpio is not treated as their next-gen console. It's a PR matter or a business decision.

 

Pros and cons. If Sony update the performance of their APIs then games automatically benefit without any changes. If I understand the Xbox One VM model, it requires a rebuild with a new version of the game otherwise your game if using the version of the OS/APIs that it was built with. You can introduce features by changing APIs long after a developer has dropped support for a software title. That was the compelling reason for complex operating systems in the first place!

 

yea pros and cons. If you introduce something that could break older titles, then they stay unaffected and you can move ahead with the change. At least I think we're thinking along the same lines, but I've no way to confirm this.

 

Pros and cons, indeed. Not ever having to worry about breaking compatibility with old titles likely allows more flexibility in the kinds of changes possible between newer GameOS iterations and, as iroboto mentioned, you can iterate faster when you don't have to do compatibility testing.

I type too slow.

 

Why not both?

 

Yup, but has this every happened? Microsoft are an OS company and Sony are not. I could almost understand if Sony had taken the VM approach to assist with compatibility but it's kind of backwards given Microsoft's schtick for their first three decades was backwards compatibility - without anything as sophisticated as VMs.

 

The legacy shit present in modern PCs to achieve this is really ridiculous, though. This is an incomparably better solution.

 

WinSxS... *shudder*

 

They talked about Scorpio in E3 2016 because they had started working on it from early 2014.

This quote from Spencer should be also related to this thread:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/..._Phil_Spencer_looks_to_the_future_of_Xbox.php

 

No matter how many people try to correct him, he continues to say 1080p is "1K".