Wired Dissects Sony as PS3 Effort Falters

PetManimal writes "Wired has an excellent analysis of Sony as it struggles to overcome the failures of the 1990s and make the PS3 live up to its promise. Sony is counting on the PS3 turning around the company's fortunes, but it may have been too ambitious. Besides being hamstrung with an unusual company culture that emphasizes small hardware teams and proprietary formats, Sony's efforts to make the PS3 kill several birds with one stone and appeal to a wider customer base is turning off the PS3's core support network: gamers. From the article: 'Then there was the decision to build Blu-ray into the PlayStation 3. Sony's logic seemed ironclad: Not only would the hi-def drive's huge storage capacity allow for far-more-realistic and complex games, the PS3 would carry Blu-ray into millions of households and drive sales of HDTVs as well. As it turned out, however, Blu-ray has done nothing good for the PS3. Blu-ray was the main reason gamers weren't able to get the new machine last spring: The launch had to be postponed because the new format's digital rights management system did not yet satisfy every Hollywood studio.'"

Comments

Re:Just for the record.

[MoFoQ]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio

  It was Sony, then a small, aggressive concern, who produced Japan's first transistor radio, the TR-55 (in 1955). Sony's greatest success was the pocket sized TR-63 released in 1957. It was the first transistor radio to utilize all miniature components and was the first Japanese radio to be imported into the U.S.A.

They may have not "invented" it persay but they did make the first transistor radio to use all miniature components. It's just like Edison...he didn't invent the light bulb...just perfected it ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bu lb#History_of_the_light_bulb ).

Re:My daily naive question

[slofstra]

Your post sounds suspicious so I ran a search on the WSJ. An article posted on 28 July 2006, states:

"The games division, Sony Computer Entertainment, reported a 26.8 billion yen operating loss in the April-June quarter due to research-and-development costs for the PlayStation 3. Division sales fell 29% as fewer consumers bought PlayStation 2 consoles in anticipation of the next model."

Re:Not inconsistant or wrong

[JFMulder]

Actually, I just thought about looking at Wikipedia, and I've found the information my other reply to my post was lacking. Seriously, Wikipedia is way better at finding information than Google now. Anyway... straight from Sony's website
Playstation 1 shipping figures
Playstation 2 shipping figures

Now, before anybody get's excited, I know that consoles shipped != consoles sold, but they are a pretty good indicator of sales anyway. And if you go to a store right now, you'll see both PS2s and 360s sitting on store shelves.

Sony started shipping PS2 on March 6, 2000. 10 months into the PS2 life span, they had shipped 6.4 million units. Microsft has shipped just north of 5 million consoles 10 months into their console life.

At the same time, Sony kept on shipping Playstation 1s. The number of console shipped from march 31 2000 to december 31rst 2000 went from 71.2 to 79.61. This means they actually shipped (thus more or less sold, face it, no stores like to keep too much unsold consoles in stock), 8.41 million consoles, while the shipped only 6.4 million PS2s.

After a year, Sony has shipped 10 million PS2 (interresting, since this is the figure Microsoft is shooting at for their first year with the 360). And shipped 9.31 million more PS1. So it nearly took a year for the PS2 to outsell the PS1.

Now, fast forward a couple of years to the 360's launch. On June 30th, Sony had shipped roughly 6.22 million consoles since the 360 came out. 21 days later, Microsoft accounced they had shipped 5 millions.

So where does that leave us. Yes, the 360 is selling less. Keep in mind that it's (360's retail at 400CAN$ and 500CAN$) between 3.1 and 3.8 times more costly than a PS2(129CAN$) and 4 to 5 times the price of a GameCube(100CAN$). On the other end, PS2(299US$) was 3 times PS1's price when it launched(99US$).

So all of this considered, I think Microsoft is doing a pretty good job.