so ken is now the scapegoat.. should give him credit for what he has done. kaz is a career executive; you can't even compare the two men, night and day.
in all honesty, most of the praises have gone to areas where kaz hasn't exactly done anything:
- ps3 dev tools: those have always been in development
- rumble: needed lawsuit to be out of the way
all you need is a figurehead and these things will naturally take care of themselves when you have a division with thousands of employees. seriously. you need to try hard to mess things up here.
the things that are actual positives, i.e. signs of change:
- admits ps3's poor launch: well, gonna start somewhere
- aggressive expansion: 2 more studios acquired, also, appears to start "bribing" 3rd parties
- emphasis more on games
nothing groundbreaking. but hey, he's a career executive, not an innovator. and the truth is, most of the time, that's all you need--ken innovates, things just didn't work out (perhaps he had too much power?). the important thing to realize is that the ps3's problems lies not so much in its execution (which, incredibly, has also been problematic), but its direction as a multimedia hub. that bit cannot be changed, no matter how much kaz wants to, nor does kaz have the influence within sony to change that. sony is committed to the ps3 for many more years, and kaz will largely act within the lines drawn by sony.
if rumors are to be believed, sony has paid square enix to make ps3 exclusives. this probably means kaz believes the way out of 3rd place is get more developers on board and get more games out. the 2 studio acquisitions reinforces this. if those were kaz's conceptions, i.e. pour more money behind the ps3, he could try to convince sony upper management to allow for yet another price cut, in the form of a lessened ps3 hardware. it is consistent with the 40Gb rumors.
problem is, the harder sony pushes, the harder microsoft pushes back. good for both ps3 fans and 360 fans, since undoubtedly this takes some 3rd party resources away from the wii, but all this means that it's gonna be hard for either ps3 or 360 to turn a profit this generation.
as much as some of you hate ken, he's probably the one who has the best chance of propelling the ps3 past the 360. he knows what the machine can do; as for kaz... he'll lower the risk of a catastrophe that ken could have induced (if not already), but i doubt he has the influence nor the fresh ideas to propel the ps3 to get past 360. to phrase in another way, kaz is perfectly replaceable by lots of other executives out there.
the Wii is an epidemic.
