Ah yes, the mythical 10-year cycle that can somehow make a product sell for a decade straight. If only markets actually worked that way, huh?
Quick economics lesson: products go through a cycle of demand that's based off of consumer interest, not supplier intentions. This cycle tends to start slow, reach a peak, and drop off. For video game consoles, this peak tends to hit around the second or third year on the market, and the drop-off is usually quite severe after that unless the product is in particularly high demand (such as the NES or PS2, which remained high sellers even after their peak years). The short of this is that the only way a product can have a 10-year life cycle is if the product actually remains in demand for 10 years. And whether or not this will happen is usually pretty obvious within about 2 years of the product being on the market, as long as there's competition to compare it to.
The PS3 is not following the same type of sales cycle as the PS2 or NES. Instead of starting slow and going meteoric, its sales have started slow and risen at a more or less average pace. It's closer to the sales cycle of the GameCube and original XBOX. Meaning that it will all but definitely drop off within the next year and a half, possibly in a quite dramatic fashion, due to the primary userbase interested in the system having already picked the system up.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
