Sony deserves all the hate people can give it right now. It has damaged this industry with the PS3. Microsoft and Nintendo both came out with platforms that can be developed for using standard programming techniques and code that can be relatively easily ported from one platform to another. Sony didn't. They came out with a system that broke away from the standards and which caused companies to have spend millions of dollars in extra development money just to get the same games out across the various platforms.
I believe this was a calculated strategy to close down the competition. They knew very well that games that were made to really take advantage of the PS3 could not be easily (inexpensively) ported to the other systems. Making games that took full advantage of both the PS2 and the original XBox was a cakewalk compared to what it is with the PS3 and 360. All they had to do was rely on their name to get people to buy the PS3 over the other platforms, and it would be a done deal. They would have tons of exclusives, because it would simply cost more than it would be worth to port to a 360 or Wii system with a tiny install base.
It's a strategy that's worked against them. Now developers are saying, "Forget it, we're not going to make our games exclusive for the PS3. We're going to make them for 360, and then we'll do as direct a port as possible to PS3 and not worry about making them take real advantage of that system. We're not going to recoup millions of extra dollars for each of our games on the PS3 simply by reprogramming our games to take full advantage of it, so why should we bother spending millions more? We're going to keep our code as close as possible between the two versions."
