Digital Home Thoughts: Who Cries For the PS3? Thee? Not Me

"My general lack of enthusiasm for Sony's people and their products is pretty well documented at this point, so the subject line of this editorial shouldn't be terribly surprising to all of you. I've been consistently critical of the PlayStation 3 over the past few years, and I confess to feeling a certain amount of told-you-so smugness as I read through the overwhelmingly negative bang-for-buck reviews that are now rolling in (I should say up front that my comments are based exclusively on nine months' worth of archived anecdotal information; I don't have a PS3 in-house). Check out, for example, two recent writeups; Ars Technica's 'incomplete' critique, and the scathing evaluation delivered by the New York Times. The PS3's crippling flaws are a revealing case study in the inherent complexity of the new product definition process, especially when it's distorted by overriding corporate dictates, and therefore a potential valuable lesson to all of you in the engineering world."

Oh man, this article reads like one of those bad reviews of a movie like Stealth... remember that 2005 movie which had all that ridiculous hype? $138 million budget, lots of flash, lots of advertising and it turned out to be a huge nothing. It only made about $31 mllion. The PS3 seems to be completely plagued with problems. Honestly, this may be one of those time when Microsoft has actually gained the lead after just two iterations of a product (usually they do it after three).