You got to hand it to Microsoft

[Lord N]

Dodece said:
Saying Microsoft was the benefactor of luck utterly ignores that of all three players Sony enjoyed the greatest undeserved success. Imagine if these events had unfolded just a year earlier. How would have Sony fared. What if they had happened two years ago would the PS3 have even been able to survive its first six months on the market. The market meandered here for years. The market was highly susceptible not only was it a matter of time, but the longer a correction was deferred the greater the effect.

Microsoft was a benefactor of its own conservative generalist strategy. Which gave it the adaptive edge for margin. The Sony model for their console only works well given certain conditions are met. The Microsoft model works well regardless of what the economic conditions happens to be at any given moment. Microsoft colonized early, incorporated many revenue streams, exploited each price market to its fullness, and most importantly conserved resources.

I see many posters griping that Microsoft just got lucky. How is it lucky to have a merit of your strategy pay out. For Sony the reckless spending that precipitated much of this economic crisis paid out for them. The spending was not realistic. Many consumers were spending far more then they should have for a console it was terribly foolish for many of them. Now reality has come crashing down, and your saying Microsoft got lucky, because everyone screwed their heads on straight. Something tells me a few people still haven't screwed their heads on straight. Microsoft simply roped a dope.

They had a strategy, and they had the confidence to stick with that strategy. They followed through even when it was costing them market share. That is not luck in my book. Luck is not something you earn. Microsoft earned this, and they will deserve all the advantage it gives them, and all the damage it does to Sony.

 

Conservative strategy? Please.

Microsoft's business model isn't anywhere near as flawless as you're trying to make it out to be. Microsoft has done plently of reckless spending. Forgotten all the money they've thrown at developers which cuts into the royalties that they receive, especially in the Japanese market(Blue Dragon, TOV, Eternal Sonata, etc) only to get a negative return? MS went with a loss leader business model for this generation and it hasn't paid off. With that kind of business model, MS would need mass exclusive third-party support, and in order to achieve that, they'd need the market share of the PS2, which is something they aren't to acquire any time soon. Since their console doesn't have enough appeal to warrant that kind of exclusive support, they've had to resort to paying for it en masse, which is why they can't post a consistent profit despite rather volumnous software sales.

Had this happened a year ago, then MS would be facing similar misfortunes as Sony considering that their console would have been more expensive and the Wii would have looked even more appealing at $250.

If you look at the big picture, this is the holiday season, and 360 sales after the holidays will fall back to 50-70K/wk in NA and EU and 6K/wk in Japan. Despite MS's recent gains, it's still a distant, unprofitable second, which is exactly where it was last generation. That being said, the real beneficiary of Sony's blunders and misfortunes has been Nintendo as it's entirely switched places with Sony from last generation.

MS should be focusing more on turning a consistent profit, because by concentrating all of their efforts on securing useless market share from the PS3 and pretending that the Wii doesn't exist, they're really just celebrating mediocrity.