It's awfully early to say, but I'd say the 360's trends have been negative whereas the PS3's trends have been positive (albeit on a tiny scale). The 360 should be strengthening its sales right now and should have had increased sales this year compared to last. It hasn't. Can anyone here imagine the PS3 selling slower next year from Jan-July than it sold this year? The PS3 selling 1.5x as many units during that period next year and 2x or 2.5x as many during that period in 2009 would not surprise me.
The PS3 *will* pick up momentum -- we just don't know exactly when. The 360 is far less clear.
MS just did a price drop, so we can reasonably expect no further price drops for a while. Their price drop was very small after 7 months of pathetic sales, suggesting that MS is so preoccupied on having a profitable fiscal '08 that it will give up the war to win a small and irrelevant battle. For a company joining additional markets for its own long-term health, Microsoft is remarkably short-sighted. They've done so many short sighted things this generation (ex: launching poorly tested hardware, stuffing the channel in the '06 holiday, addressing the hardware issues poorly, etc) that one has to wonder what reasoning they apply to the decisions they make.
MS makes many of its moves to affect the perception of its investors. Launching early, stuffing the channel, and denying hardware failures until they could no longer deny them were all for the benefit of investor confidence in the short term, but all have or will ultimately damage investor confidence.
MS is like that rich kid used to being given things on a silver platter and doesn't know how to deal with situations when things don't just go his way.
