All some admirable points--but Sony has only a fraction of the liquid assets that Microsoft has. This means that if there is a price war between the two companies, Sony will lose. And Sony has had higher losses to date for their product advancement as well. You might want to point out the billion that Microsoft has laid out for repairs over the lifetime of already-sold 360s, but how does this compare to the almost 2 billion that Sony posted losses for the game division's fiscal year ending March 2007? Sony does a lot of business. In that light they are very successful. But they do not have the assets to maintain losses the way that they have lost on the PS3. Microsoft posted a global net income this past year of 12 billion. Sony? Just barely one billion. Seeing systems on the shelf only one week after launch is something that just did not happen with the 360. This didn't even happen with the PS2. All of the events that have transpired to date put Sony at third place, and developers saw it coming. It is one of the reasons there are fewer games. It's definitely the reason there are fewer games coming, too. Sony doesn't have the money, nor do they year-to-year make the kind of money to combat developers and other partners coming to their senses and going where they can profit.
You don't have to be the leader of the pack to be profitable, Nintendo did it for many years of course, but so does Apple. Where is the third place computer platform? Linux isn't exactly it, being too splintered and ineffective to the consumer. So there IS no third place there, it's a drop off a cliff if you want alternative and you don't want a Macintosh. And the ultimate third-place example, do you remember the TurboGrafx?
Sony's federation of divisions is widely attributed to be a big part of the problem with the PS3. BluRay for games sounds like a good idea and games can always use more memory, but at this point none need it. There is more storage available to BluRay than any game requires or than any team can reasonably develop into a single game given the typical time-frame for release schedules. Oblivion for the PC has more content available with mods, with higher resolution textures and full-featured surround sound audio than you will ever play on the PS3 (or the 360), I just looked at my installation and with things like Qarl's texture enhancement pack and a tonne more of content, additional quests, audio, etc. it was all less than 7.8GB. This fits handily on a DVD. It's clear BluRay was done for movies on the PS3, and this hurt the PS3 as a game machine, when it brought on delays for the PAL market and even fewer units to the earlier launch in other regions than anticipated. And there were STILL units sitting on shelves, only a week after its debut. The price-drop is nothing but a fire-sale on the original model which will not come back once it is gone, Sony very likely has about as many units sitting in warehouses as they have already sold to take the prices south this soon, and the thing is still vastly expensive in other key markets (Europe/PAL). Yes, Sony is very successful, but the game division is not more recently, and the PS2 will not continue to support the PS3 like a proverbial crutch going into next year as more games are moving to other newer platforms that are growing while that one diminishes. Because Sony is so segmented between their electronics, computers, games, movie production, etc. it is a LOT easier for them to pull out of any one market or to drastically alter their m.o. if they ever need to. The analyst gamespot interviewed knows this, and sees signs of it happening already. Not enough proof for you? Why don't I have a PS2 memory card slot under the flap in my PS3 for free? Answer: So you can buy Sony's adapter for more $. Why do they have a memory stick slot there instead? Answer: they're pushing another format again. Why did they have to develop yet another optical format for use with the PSP? They already had MD and Hi-MD discs. No, they wanted to lock you in to another format, one that they could control for their portable movie format, and the PSP suffers because of it similarly to the PS3 with BluRay.
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