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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.'"
BTW, I should also note that the gimmick that the DS won on was the touchscreen, not the dual-screens that Nintendo was focusing on at first and that the system was named after. And it barely even counts as a gimmick; PDAs had had good touchscreens for many years before the DS, so it wasn't really a shocking idea to put one on a gaming device. The pedigree for the Wiimote consists of the Power Glove and the Philips CDi remote, neither of which were ever considered laudatory efforts.
Rob