GearWERKZ TechBlog

A few weeks ago, I commented on how the media was letting out this over-exaggerated gasp about the revelation that a variant of the HTC Touch Pro2 was landing at AT&T. I mean, were we not already expecting this? Now, I find the same is true of the recent news on Sony's price-cut on the Playstation 3 down to $299.

I mean. Really? What is obnoxious about this is not just how a lot of the media is acting, but in the fact that this should have happened a long time ago. It is akin to how, when Apple screws up, we calmly look the other way, and then laud them for fixing something they should have never broken in the first place.

Sony is in third place in the console war. A distant third. The PS3 debuted an order of magnitude more expensive than the highest end XBox 360 on the market at the time. That they needed to cut prices in order to regain some ground was a no-brainer that was readily evident definitely by the holiday season of 2008. The only truly thing to be amazed about by this late-breaking news [said with sarcasm] is why in the heck it took so long.

So does Sony deserve some credit for finally arriving at the conclusion of a financial analysis that a 5th grader could have solved? Absolutely not. I truly wish the best for Sony, and I own a PS3. But as a business student, the summation of tomfoolery seen since the PS3 launched is at times flabbergasting. Blu-Ray, Playstation Home, the PlayStation Network, no 1080i rendering, Gran Turismo, backwards compatibility, the six-axis...It reeks of the same type of lunacy that led to the eventual failure of companies like Netscape, Wang, and the partial failures of Atari and Sega.

And just to make sure the picture does not get painted that all is well with the PS3 once the price-cut hits, the XMB implementation is still atrocious. The number of functions that you still need to back out of a game or even a chat to access or execute is still horrible. As nice as a price cut will be (for all the consumers who have not bought a PS3 for the nearly 3 years it has been on the market), Sony really just needs to ask for a do-over, and move on to their next-gen console. This time, hopefully they will outsource the software component to a company that actually knows how to make an OS and a GUI.

While I know it will drive others through the roof, I will throw out the universe-rending thought of a what a great console could be produced by a joint venture between Sony and Microsoft; where Sony would design the hardware and Microsoft would do the OS and GUI and network backbone.
- Vr/Z..>>