Wow, Sony delays PS3 in Europe

Microsoft hints at delay of Vista in Europe.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/07/AR2006090700612.html

Mr. K@23: Yes, but Microsoft has major problems too. They are losing mindshare faster than any company in history. More and more people are admitting that they use Windows “because I HAVE to” for work reasons or for that one application that only runs there. The development process at MS is by their own admission broken, as is staffing, compensation and leadership transition. Sony is used to competing in crowded spaces and their products are still prominently displayed in Circuit City (etc.) stores. I seriously doubt that MOST people will pin their next TV or stereo purchase on Sony’s DRM screw-up (even though I might).

More importantly, in case you analysts haven’t noticed, PC/HW/SW and media companies have a problem on their hands, or some might call it an opportunity and that is the fact that these game consoles are becoming more powerful than the PCs they were meant to supplement while at the same time PCs are becoming cheaper. There is a role reversal underway that isn’t quite fully realized. One of the CH9 videos that Robert pointed to talks about how heavy computing can be done as much as 10 times faster by relying on the fancy video card in most PCs rather than using the processor that is supposed to be in charge of everything. Our old Intel friend is becoming little more than a glorified device controller, or more accurately a coordinator of device controllers, while what used to be a device controller is learning to do all the interesting chores. Those game consoles are built on technology that looks a lot like the multi-processor technology that video cards have had for a while now at a time when we are just getting used to the idea that we can have a dual core Intel or AMD box.

We may in fact have finally arrived at a place where the old Intel 8080 instruction set and all its cluged-together descendants can be relegated back to the dishwashers and microwave ovens they were designed for. The challenge Microsoft faces is the potential need to re-write Windows from scratch (and who can say that would be a bad thing?) and as Linux has already demonstrated (and to a lesser extent OS X) the details of the underlying hardware become almost insignificant.

When we look back on this time ten years from now nobody will remember the console wars, but they will remember this as about the time when the Intel/Microsoft duopoly unraveled for good. Whether Sony remains a significant player in the milieu that will follow I think is relatively unimportant.

>>techies hate Microsoft for how it has set back the technology industry.

Can someone explain to me how did they do it?
What was there before Microsoft for the masses?

Techies probably hate MS because they took away their privileges. Today average Joe’s are able to work on computers because of the crappy MS software.

28: “>>techies hate Microsoft for how it has set back the technology industry.
Can someone explain to me how did they do it?
What was there before Microsoft for the masses?”
I answer this question so often I should save a template of some sort.

It wasn’t exclusively Microsoft, but the PC in general. Whether things would have evolved so badly had Microsoft not been in the picture is open for speculation, but as Microsoft plays such an important role in the average user’s PC experience, they have to take the bulk of the blame as it stands.

The PC allowed many people who would never have been allowed inside the air-conditioned/raised floor computer room the chance to hit the on/off switch of a computer for the first time. I’ve met many people who consider this an important milestone in their life, and maybe that has something to do with the fact that “booting” is such a popular pastime for PC users. (On the old mainframe systems I had to schedule special time to re-boot the computer to show new employees what was involved, because it was something that almost never happened otherwise.)

Over the years I’ve watched these folks, newly empowered with their own private on/off switch demonstrate repeatedly why they were never allowed near the computer room. They still blame everything that goes wrong (including such things as forgetting to do backups) on “the computer”, and they marvel at such “new” concepts as RAID drives, uninterruptable power supplies, vector processing, virtual machines and “managed code” that were invented in the 60s or 70s.

As the computer industry recovers from that set-back (which is quite real) the resultant systems are going to look a whole lot like where mainframes were headed anyway. Most people will not be aware of this, nor will they be aware that we could have probably gotten here a lot faster by standing on the shoulders of giants rather than re-inventing the wheel (sometimes mixed metaphors make sense).

How do more and more people connect to the Internet? Through a specialized box that keeps out all the bad stuff. In my case that box also connects to a hard drive that manages shared storage, it communicates with my streaming devices on several radios throughout the house, it does it’s own scheduled back-up, and non of this involves any technology from Intel or Microsoft. Imagine that! Most of what I do with computers these days involves data stored somewhere in “the cloud” of the Internet and I only need to worry about making local copies when I travel where there will be no Internet access (an increasingly rare situation).

As I mentioned in a post above, much of what was wrought when IBM allowed other companies to control the destiny of the PC has now been rendered itself obsolete by yet “newer” technologies that look, once again like carefully controlled centralized systems. Even compare with strong points of new Xbox and PS3 systems being server based and you see that the PC/Game console are looking more and more like the vision of smart terminals that (again) isn’t really a new idea at all.

Christopher,

Do you know what the most important part of the XBox 360 is? The Media Centre Extender. Why? Because it connects the traditional hub in the home (the PC) to the XBox, which is the hub of the Digital Home.

What you are not getting here is the XBox is not about the console market, its not about games. That isn’t the market its after. The market it is after is much, much bigger – the “Digital Home”. Microsoft only entered the market once they realised what Sony had was a competitor for the ‘digital hub’ in a home.

This is the same reason Microsoft made sure they won the original Browser Wars – they didn’t give two stuffs about Netscape until Marc Andreessen got all giddy about it and started saying it was going to be the Operating System of tomorrow. And its why they are ploughing the billions into Windows Live, to head off Google and the Zanemeisters of Web 2.0.

Microsoft know that when or if they manage to get the Digital Home market, the rewards will be huge.

Good God. ‘The problem was normal proles were allowed access to computers’ and ‘the mainframe was the way to go’.

Are there people still stupid enough to think this?

Interesting. Seems Christopher did a pretty good job of shutting Scoble down with some actual numbers. I didn’t see a response from him. Maybe he went to the Sony store to do more “customer research”?

This is the same reason Microsoft made sure they won the original Browser Wars.

Let me think – MS owns system, MS owns API, MS creates a free web browser – wait a moment – and you want to win this war against them with a $30 browser?

The Internet playground is a different story – they don’t own it and everything is (almost) for free. That’s the reason why MS is quite irrelevant there. Even after pouring millions into the MSN division.

Maybe he went to the Sony store to do more “customer research”?

He is supposedly camping in front of Apple store with his son waiting for September 12 show time

No Cider, he’s just pointing out that all this crap you think is so new on Windows/Mac OS X/Linux/Unix isn’t.

Christopher shut me down? Heh! I wasn’t arguing with the numbers — they demonstrate what I’m talking about. How much market share did Xbox have five years ago? Zero!

How much did Sony have? A lot more than it has now.

Hint: next year MS will have even more.

And I, for one, hope Microsoft wins this one. Sony is a screwed company, even more than Microsoft. I like my Xbox 360, pity they made it so closed… If it was compatible with the macs those early adopters have… It would be an even better story for Microsoft….

Microsoft know(s) that when or if they manage to get the Digital Home market, the rewards will be huge.

You know as well as I do that this will never happen, Microsoft will spend billions drilling for oil only to find sand. Most End Users aren’t going to hook up a computer to a game system to TV do Media Centerish stuff. The 360 is a gaming machine, first and foremost, even the marketing is aimed at that.

Don’t ask me, goto the horses mouth…

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/xbox_pr.html

I ask Allard whether his book-sized memo outlines a broader strategy featuring Xbox 360 as a Trojan horse that sneaks Windows into the living room entertainment stack. It seems like a reasonable question. At $150 each, PS2 and Xbox are already cheap ways to kill two home-entertainment must-haves with one stone. But Allard recoils at the very suggestion. He looks like he’s about to curse, but then composes himself enough to answer my query. “If there’s a serious gamer out there who doesn’t get an Xbox console because a mom who wants to watch DVDs grabbed the last one, then we’ve failed,” he says.

Well Sony is going to need the lower launch numbers to try and make it look like everyone and their dog is trying to get one at $600 a pop.

The ’07 holidays will be the true test and by then the PS3s will be collecting dust.