If you were someone looking forward to Home, do you feel suspicious in any way? Think about it. MS beat Sony to the punch on a new interface and had everyone buzzing. I have friends who barely play their consoles at all and don't follow the industry enough to know about NXE, and they ALL knew about it and were excited to download it. (For the record, I don't hate NXE, but also didn't see the need for it.)
So now Home is suddenly going to come out about as deep into 2008 as you can get and is being tagged as a public beta. I feel like this is a bad move, and a lame attempt at playing cover-ass. What it tells me is that Home is not ready for prime time, probably doesn't have enough content, and may even be buggy. But since Sony seems to feel that Home must be released in 2008, they're going to slap the "public beta" label on it. That way if it sucks (I'm fairly certain that it will at first) you can't really be mad. It's a beta, right?
If I were a PS3 fanboy hoping that Sony will gain some market share, I would be pissed about this. Sony's hopes of "winning" the holiday shopping season are dead. There is no way Home has time to drum up enough business to catch up before Christmas. You know when Home WOULD have time to do that? 2009!!!! The PS3 has some great games on the way in 2009. With a good ad campaign for Home and some well placed PR about Killzone 2, GT5, God of War 3, etc., Sony could really get their act together.
Sony is nickel diming their way through this generation, and I really think that in the end it's going to bite them in the ass.
