| kylohk said: Net income dropping 71.8% in just one quarter? That's surprising. Given this, Sony cannot afford to drop the price until maybe Q3 2009, unless they "miraculously" find a way to lower the cost of so many parts at once! For the price cut to have any help on Sony in catching up with MS, they should wait until maybe GT5 is released. And have a drastically cheaper "entry level" PS3 model bundled with the game. (Or they stand to empty their wallets even faster) |
Not only that: Sony will always have problem in dropping the price because they are buying different components from different manufacturers. One big example is nVidia (who is a real bitch on this matter... go ask MS why this time they chose ATI instead!!!) and its GPU. Sony doesn't own the patent on that component, so it cannot give the manufacture plan to someone else to build it for them!
MS learned this fact at its own cost in the previous generation, when it didn't have the patents on both CPU and GPU, and was forced to buy the components directly from Intel and nVidia! When they dropped the price on the Xbox, MS did it at its own cost, losing billions of money... but they could afford it because they had large funds from other divisions.
And this time they did not make the same mistake again: MS own the patent on every single component of the console, and in fact they also went through multiple big redesigns of the console without many problems.
Considering this, I cannot understand why Sony made that kind of choice, knowing what MS had experienced the last generation (especially with nVidia!) and also that they don't have that much money to throw around!!!
Oh, and by the way. Nintendo was the smartest ever: they always had the patents on every part of every console they made!
Read these if you want to know more:
http://www.xbreporter.com/xbox_2_news.php
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE5DD153BF934A35751C0A9659C8B63&fta=y
http://www.neowin.net/news/gamers/03/04/03/will-nvidia-microsoft-split-on-xbox-2
