Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Sony Playstation 3 Fiasco

At last the numbers are in showing that Sony has totally messed up its Playstation 3 launch. Firing the boss of the unit a few weeks ago is going to do little for short-term recovery, judging by the availability of BluRay movie titles and PS3 games on the shelves here in "old Europe".

Sony now estimates its game segment will post an operating loss of about 50 billion yen (US $413.9 million) in the business year to next March, according to figures just released in Tokyo. Sony still expects to see a sharp rise in PS3 hardware shipments to a total of 11 million units this year. In 2006/7, it shipped 5.5 million PS3s, which fell below the company's initial target, and of those, about 3.6 million units were actually sold.

Sony is blaming competition from Nintendo and Microsoft XBOX, which is typical "Blame Somebody Else" mentality that is killing creativity in Tokyo. They simply do not know what they are selling - nor how to market this device. Its a media center, not (just) a games console. It needs content on it to make it interesting. The unit has its own Internet browser, but no plugs-ins to allow to play on-line games like World of Warcraft. Can't run itunes on it. The human interface on the Sony Playstation 3 controls are the worst design ever made - I challenge anyone to scan a BluRay movie menu with a PS3 controller.

You'd be crazy to invest in these guys until they smarten up their strategy. And that doesn't look like its going to happen soon.

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