Retail space for established system is going to depend primarily on installed base. Of course the PS2 gets the bulk of the space. For the current generation of consoles, though, Microsoft is the one with the advantage and thanks to Sony's production problems they'll be dead last after the Wii launches tomorrow.
There's a lot more than "novelty and originality" in play for all your examples:
-I love Belgium beers. The U.S. buys Budweiser.
Belgium beer is hardly novel or original. It may be better, on average, but that's another issue entirely. More importantly, domestic beer is cheap.
-I loved Firefly. The world loves Desperate Houswives.
Firefly is a lovely show. On the other hand, it's not particularly accessible (harder to start watching if you missed the first episodes) and suffered from the boneheaded decision to show the episodes out of order. Not to mention that Fox is the most cancel-happy network on the face of the earth.:)
-I have art over my mantlepiece. The suberbanites put a large mirror there.
I know far more people with art on their walls than mirrors. Not that I think aesthetic taste is a particularly good indicator of the gaming market.
-I love that little place down the street. The U.S. loves Applebees.
More importantly you know about the little place down the street. In this case, since we're dealing with three nationally known brands, I'd say the situation is more like Applebee's vs Chili's vs TGI Friday's than Applebee's vs the little place down the street.
I would caution those who champion the Wii to take a closer look at what they're doing. They're saying it's great before they've even seen a unit in person. Some guy in another thread insinuated that PS3 purchasers were acting like sheep.
I generally try to avoid getting into debates about what's "better", because ultimately it's a matter of taste. One person may be more interested in a novel controller scheme. Another might want the absolute best graphics money can buy. Someone else might be interested in a particular game or genre that's strong on one of the consoles.
That doesn't stop me from thinking that Sony serious misjudged the market (and their production capacity) this round, or that Nintendo has a good chance of expanding the market by offering a more unique product at a more affordable price point.
The problem I see is that this generation is unfolding much like the previous one, except that Nintendo has taken steps to significantly differentiate its console from the rest.
Last generation Sony beat Microsoft and Nintendo to market by a year. This time Microsoft beat Sony and Nintendo by a year.
Last generation the Sony and Microsoft released at the same price, $100 more than Nintendo. This generation Sony's base price is $200 more than Microsoft and $250 more than Nintendo.
Last generation Sony sold 900,000 units it's first week in Japan. This generation Sony only managed to ship 80,000 units.
Last generation Sony sold 500,000 units at launch in the United States. This generation... well, Sony claimed they were shipping 400,000 but retailers were given last minute reductions so who knows what the actual number is.
Last generation Sony sold 500,000 units in Europe the first year. This generation they had to cancel their European launch this year.
Last generation Sony sold 100,000 units in Australia the first year. This generation they haven't even scheduled one.
Last generation Nintendo had the worst launch portfolio. This generation they have the best.
I could go on, but I think it's pretty obvious that this generation is considerably different than the prior one. Sure Sony had production problems last generation as well, but they still managed to ship more units in the launch window than their own competition at the time (the Dreamcast). By the time Microsoft and Nintendo made it to markey they not only had solved their production problems, but had a solid installed base.
That only works if production outstrips demand. Until that happens, it's more like "Sony creates a $900 machine and sells it for $600. They lose $300 if you buy it. If you don't buy it, someone else does, along with accessories and games (like Sony is banking on)".
Not that I advocate buying a machine you don't want just to stick it to a corporation. They may be out $300, but you'd be out $600.
There's a difference between buying an HDTV (starting around $250) and paying $3100 for a console and the television to watch it on.
Projected HDTV sales for 2006 are ~ $23B with about sixteen million units sold. That averages to somewhere in the range of $1400-1500 (well below the price of the unit you cited) and a lot of those are additional sets in a single household. About 30% of owners in a recent survey planed on purchasing another set this year.
Currently the mean annual income of homes with HD sets is 42% higher than those still on SD. Market is shifting fairly rapidly, but HDTVs are still largely toys of the relatively affluent.
I'm likely to drop about $600 on my next television. I'll save the $2,500 for something a bit more practical - new furnace maybe, or downpayment on a bigger car, or toss it into my kids college fund.
You can't compare raw clock speed on different architectures. The 750CL core has more execution units, branch prediction, and a shorter pipeline with significantly lower cycle-latency for a lot of operations (e.g. 3-4 cycles for double percision FP comared to ten cycles for the Xenon, one cycle load/store latency compared to two cycle for the Xenon).
Is the Xbox faster? Most certainly, but likely not anywhere near 13 times.
It's about 20% of households every year, overall. Keep in mind that some of that churn is people who are replacing perfectly good sets every year or two because they have more money than sense.;) Current projections have about two out of every three households having at least one HDTV by 2010.
Actually, 26% of HDTV owners have more than one and 29% percent expect to buy another in the next year. But that's because the annual income of HDTV households is 42% above average.
That likely will change as they become more mainstream rather than being the toys of the affluent.:)
They've got a number of screw-ups this round - they cost significantly more than the competition, production problems are going to hurt the footing they could have gained during the holiday season, they're going to miss the 2006 season entirely in Europe, and so forth.
It's really too early to know how the market will take it. Gaming news sites really don't have their finger on the pulse of the market, in my opinion.
Probably a bad choice. Coke Classic is still the top-selling non-alcoholic beverage in the country, and the Coca-Cola Company is still the market leader in the carbonated beverage market (43.1% v 31.7% for PepsiCo and 14.5% for Cadbury Schweppes).
(In one sense, PepsiCo is "winning" though, insofar as they have a higher market capitalization than Coca-Cola. That's more a product of their diversification than success in the "cola wars" though. Less than a quarter of their revenue comes from their carbonated beverage division; the rest comes from other brands (Frito-Lay, Quaker, Tropicana, Gatorade).
Not everyone does the bulk of their work at a desk. I spend the bulk of my time in conference rooms, other people's offices, colocations, etc, etc. If I was one of those people who only transport their laptop from room to room or from their car, I might consider something larger than my current 14.1".
Did you miss the recent study that found only 17% of iPod owners regularly buy music online, and ultimately only 5% of the music on an iPod on average is from ITMS?
Plenty of people don't shop Apple for music, often specifically because they reject the lock-in it represents.
Not quite. Phenylalanine is an essential amino acid that happens to be one component of aspartame. Almost all protein rich foods contain a fair amount of it. People with PKU typically need to cut out meat, fish, poulty, milk, eggs, cheese, legumes, nuts and so forth - not just aspartame.
And no, phenylanine does not break down to methanol. Aspartame is a methyl ester of two amino acids (phenylalanine and aspartic acid). This can hydrolize to methanol, which is then metabolized into a trace amount of methanol. Though this sounds scary, the amount release is far below toxic levels, and in fact you get far more exposure from drinking a glass of many common juices than you do from diet soda.
Also, the temperature aspartame breaks down is not simple 80dF. It actually varies by pH levels; at nuetral levels it doesn't break down until 86dC (or about 187dF).
Intel also promised us a 10GHz Pentium 4 by 2004.:)
The chip they actually demoed with eighty cores is far from being a conventional design. The "cores" were actually simplistic floating point execution units implementing a non-x86 instruction set. Sounds a lot more like the Cell's synergistsic processing elements than full blown cores.
And really, there's not a chance in hell the consoles of tomorrow will even come close to enterprise servers of today. Keep in mind that an eight-way Opteron with 128GB of memory still falls into the "entry-level" classification used by Gartner. You'd probably have to drop to only 32GB of memory to fit into IDC's "volume server" category. The "enterprise" category starts at $500k and more.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Retail space for established system is going to depend primarily on installed base. Of course the PS2 gets the bulk of the space. For the current generation of consoles, though, Microsoft is the one with the advantage and thanks to Sony's production problems they'll be dead last after the Wii launches tomorrow.
There's a lot more than "novelty and originality" in play for all your examples:
:)
-I love Belgium beers. The U.S. buys Budweiser.
Belgium beer is hardly novel or original. It may be better, on average, but that's another issue entirely. More importantly, domestic beer is cheap.
-I loved Firefly. The world loves Desperate Houswives.
Firefly is a lovely show. On the other hand, it's not particularly accessible (harder to start watching if you missed the first episodes) and suffered from the boneheaded decision to show the episodes out of order. Not to mention that Fox is the most cancel-happy network on the face of the earth.
-I have art over my mantlepiece. The suberbanites put a large mirror there.
I know far more people with art on their walls than mirrors. Not that I think aesthetic taste is a particularly good indicator of the gaming market.
-I love that little place down the street. The U.S. loves Applebees.
More importantly you know about the little place down the street. In this case, since we're dealing with three nationally known brands, I'd say the situation is more like Applebee's vs Chili's vs TGI Friday's than Applebee's vs the little place down the street.
I would caution those who champion the Wii to take a closer look at what they're doing. They're saying it's great before they've even seen a unit in person. Some guy in another thread insinuated that PS3 purchasers were acting like sheep.
I generally try to avoid getting into debates about what's "better", because ultimately it's a matter of taste. One person may be more interested in a novel controller scheme. Another might want the absolute best graphics money can buy. Someone else might be interested in a particular game or genre that's strong on one of the consoles.
That doesn't stop me from thinking that Sony serious misjudged the market (and their production capacity) this round, or that Nintendo has a good chance of expanding the market by offering a more unique product at a more affordable price point.
The problem I see is that this generation is unfolding much like the previous one, except that Nintendo has taken steps to significantly differentiate its console from the rest.
Last generation Sony beat Microsoft and Nintendo to market by a year. This time Microsoft beat Sony and Nintendo by a year.
Last generation the Sony and Microsoft released at the same price, $100 more than Nintendo. This generation Sony's base price is $200 more than Microsoft and $250 more than Nintendo.
Last generation Sony sold 900,000 units it's first week in Japan. This generation Sony only managed to ship 80,000 units.
Last generation Sony sold 500,000 units at launch in the United States. This generation... well, Sony claimed they were shipping 400,000 but retailers were given last minute reductions so who knows what the actual number is.
Last generation Sony sold 500,000 units in Europe the first year. This generation they had to cancel their European launch this year.
Last generation Sony sold 100,000 units in Australia the first year. This generation they haven't even scheduled one.
Last generation Nintendo had the worst launch portfolio. This generation they have the best.
I could go on, but I think it's pretty obvious that this generation is considerably different than the prior one. Sure Sony had production problems last generation as well, but they still managed to ship more units in the launch window than their own competition at the time (the Dreamcast). By the time Microsoft and Nintendo made it to markey they not only had solved their production problems, but had a solid installed base.
There's a big difference between what early adopters will pay and what the wider market will bear.
I think your theory only works if they decide to stop producing them before the guy who wants one and will buy the accessories gets one.
:)
That's why I said, "That only works if production outstrips demand."
That only works if production outstrips demand. Until that happens, it's more like "Sony creates a $900 machine and sells it for $600. They lose $300 if you buy it. If you don't buy it, someone else does, along with accessories and games (like Sony is banking on)".
Not that I advocate buying a machine you don't want just to stick it to a corporation. They may be out $300, but you'd be out $600.
There's a difference between buying an HDTV (starting around $250) and paying $3100 for a console and the television to watch it on.
Projected HDTV sales for 2006 are ~ $23B with about sixteen million units sold. That averages to somewhere in the range of $1400-1500 (well below the price of the unit you cited) and a lot of those are additional sets in a single household. About 30% of owners in a recent survey planed on purchasing another set this year.
Currently the mean annual income of homes with HD sets is 42% higher than those still on SD. Market is shifting fairly rapidly, but HDTVs are still largely toys of the relatively affluent.
I'm likely to drop about $600 on my next television. I'll save the $2,500 for something a bit more practical - new furnace maybe, or downpayment on a bigger car, or toss it into my kids college fund.
I've never seen yyyy-dd-mm used in the wild. I'm open to an example if you can find one.
You can't compare raw clock speed on different architectures. The 750CL core has more execution units, branch prediction, and a shorter pipeline with significantly lower cycle-latency for a lot of operations (e.g. 3-4 cycles for double percision FP comared to ten cycles for the Xenon, one cycle load/store latency compared to two cycle for the Xenon).
Is the Xbox faster? Most certainly, but likely not anywhere near 13 times.
I used the term 3rd generation mostly because it appears to me that the major players are competing on a 3 themed basis.
And Wii is "3 themed" because... what, it rhymes with three?
The ISO standard (yyyy-mm-dd, yyyymmdd, among other variations) are just an unambiguous, and adds the benefit of making date sorting trivial.
It's not just a good idea, it's an international standard (ISO 8601)!
It's about 20% of households every year, overall. Keep in mind that some of that churn is people who are replacing perfectly good sets every year or two because they have more money than sense. ;) Current projections have about two out of every three households having at least one HDTV by 2010.
Actually, 26% of HDTV owners have more than one and 29% percent expect to buy another in the next year. But that's because the annual income of HDTV households is 42% above average.
:)
That likely will change as they become more mainstream rather than being the toys of the affluent.
Not quite. Nintendo is trying to expand the market for a specific product. Pepsi diversified it's portfolio with a variety of products.
They've got a number of screw-ups this round - they cost significantly more than the competition, production problems are going to hurt the footing they could have gained during the holiday season, they're going to miss the 2006 season entirely in Europe, and so forth.
It's really too early to know how the market will take it. Gaming news sites really don't have their finger on the pulse of the market, in my opinion.
Probably a bad choice. Coke Classic is still the top-selling non-alcoholic beverage in the country, and the Coca-Cola Company is still the market leader in the carbonated beverage market (43.1% v 31.7% for PepsiCo and 14.5% for Cadbury Schweppes).
(In one sense, PepsiCo is "winning" though, insofar as they have a higher market capitalization than Coca-Cola. That's more a product of their diversification than success in the "cola wars" though. Less than a quarter of their revenue comes from their carbonated beverage division; the rest comes from other brands (Frito-Lay, Quaker, Tropicana, Gatorade).
It's like how Wesley Snipes said, in White Men Can't Jump, you can HEAR Jimmi, but you aren't LISTENING to Jimmi.
Strike that, reverse it.
It was on Slashdot, about a month ago.
Not everyone does the bulk of their work at a desk. I spend the bulk of my time in conference rooms, other people's offices, colocations, etc, etc. If I was one of those people who only transport their laptop from room to room or from their car, I might consider something larger than my current 14.1".
Did you miss the recent study that found only 17% of iPod owners regularly buy music online, and ultimately only 5% of the music on an iPod on average is from ITMS?
Plenty of people don't shop Apple for music, often specifically because they reject the lock-in it represents.
Not quite. Phenylalanine is an essential amino acid that happens to be one component of aspartame. Almost all protein rich foods contain a fair amount of it. People with PKU typically need to cut out meat, fish, poulty, milk, eggs, cheese, legumes, nuts and so forth - not just aspartame.
And no, phenylanine does not break down to methanol. Aspartame is a methyl ester of two amino acids (phenylalanine and aspartic acid). This can hydrolize to methanol, which is then metabolized into a trace amount of methanol. Though this sounds scary, the amount release is far below toxic levels, and in fact you get far more exposure from drinking a glass of many common juices than you do from diet soda.
Also, the temperature aspartame breaks down is not simple 80dF. It actually varies by pH levels; at nuetral levels it doesn't break down until 86dC (or about 187dF).
Intel also promised us a 10GHz Pentium 4 by 2004. :)
The chip they actually demoed with eighty cores is far from being a conventional design. The "cores" were actually simplistic floating point execution units implementing a non-x86 instruction set. Sounds a lot more like the Cell's synergistsic processing elements than full blown cores.
Server's will continue getting faster too. :)
:)
And really, there's not a chance in hell the consoles of tomorrow will even come close to enterprise servers of today. Keep in mind that an eight-way Opteron with 128GB of memory still falls into the "entry-level" classification used by Gartner. You'd probably have to drop to only 32GB of memory to fit into IDC's "volume server" category. The "enterprise" category starts at $500k and more.