Can you post links because I don't recall the same thread every other month, in fact it's been quite a while since the subject was raised, excusing the thread asking whether it was a success or not which is a different question. 

The PS3 has changed a lot, I love my 3D Bluray movies which no doubt if I had bought a regular Bluray player 3 years ago I would have had to replace it by now to get the feature.  I think the 360 has changed far more though and the PS3 has been forced to try and stay on parity.  My statement was in defence of Sony by the way, I was admitting that it's easy to say what can be done differently now but all thats happened this generation would have been impossible to call.

If they made a cheap product with say a $200-300 launch price tag that was essentially two PS2s taped together, they would have raked it in. And for that my hat goes off to them for the risks they took with Blu-Ray.

Where are the JRPG exclusive everyone loves. The Legend games, the Arc games the dark cloud games.

Release first. Release cheaper (even at the sacrifice of power). Dump the SIXAXIS motion control and not try to add it because of the Wii. Dump the browser since console browsers get outdated very quickly (ie: Wii, DS, PSP, Dreamcast). Focus on the old school franchises like Jak, Kri, Ico.

But most importantly, just release first and have a decent price.

That's definitely what Sony was thinking. Of course, they believed that Bluray would take off in the way that DVD had, and it just, unfortunately for them, hasn't.

At the end of the day, they could have kept everything else the same, gone with DVD and been just fine this generation. They could have launched alongside 360 and probably would have beaten them, or at least been pretty close to neck and neck. Though they droned on and on about how bluray was necessary for games this generation, we now know that it really wasn't, but that's all a matter of hindsight (well, to be fair, many of us knew at the time, simply based on the math of what the system could process, but that's another issue).

On the bright side, they're well prepared for next-gen, and shouldn't need to go crazy on hardware; simply offer additional cores and an updated GPU, more RAM and hopefully a wider system bus.

Best response imho. Everything else mentioned wouldn't have made much of a difference.

Not first...It doesn't always work out being first.

*cries*

If sony released the 360 with sony's brand (no changes whatsoever), it would be as popular or even more popular than the ps2.

I agree with what a lot of people have already said, the high price point and the one year gap between the launch of the 360 and the launch of the PS3.

the biggest loss was GTA4. when that went multiplaform so did most of the important other franchises. a lot of people say MGS4 was still exclusive, yeah sure that was a great exclusive, but it dosent move consoles quite like a GTA.

but i suppose they learn from their mistakes and i'm looking forward to the Vita here in Europe. with a lot more games avaliable much more quickly! unlike the PS3 where we were waiting years for the most important Playstation titles, FF13, GT5, TLG, even God of War 3, had that been out sooner, or even a launch title it would've been very important.

there was no games that could quite match the launch power of something like Mario or Halo, so that was another problem. a problem that wont happen again with names like Uncharted or Killzone launching the PS4.

I think they can keep blu-ray, as they wanted to make money of the right's of blu-ray.
But everything else should be optimized with the best price to performance in mind.
Using a cheaper and easier to develop CPU/ram/gpu.
Also try to cut the price as much as possible to 399 or 449.

I don't remember how they marketed the ps3, but I think they should have a ps3 in the gaming section and ps3 at the home entertainment section of anything big box retailer.

Since Sony will make money of blu-ray digital rights, and software of gaming. They can succeed with both markets. People that want a blu-ray in 2006 should think of the ps3. It was the best blu-ray player at that time too. I think Sony needed to segmented its marketing strategy to address those 2 different markets.