It's my belief that the deciding battleground for last generation was back in 2000, with the clash between PS2 and Dreamcast. Momentum is a powerful thing, as we all know, and it's very, very hard for a company to change sales momentum once it's resolved (as Nintendo can attest after watching their $100 machine continue to languish at 3rd place). The timing of the PS2 against the Xbox and GameCube was absolutely critical to their performance, more than any other factor.
I mean, sure, people talk about the PS2's tremendous 3rd party support, they talk about the PlayStation brand's tremendous influence, but these are often an end in themselves, rather than a means (as Wii can attest). I think that Sony's ability to grab the initiative from Sega, a year before Xbox or GameCube came on the scene, was what ultimately gave them the great things that later secured the PS2's greater strengths.
Basically, Sony's ability to out-hype the Dreamcast in that critical early juncture is what won them that generation. Everything else fell into place because of that. Now, superior 3rd party support was part of what gave PS2 that edge in hype over the Dreamcast, but that was as much through Sony's ability to convince 3rd parties that the PS2 was the horse to bet on, not Dreamcast, as it happened to turn out.
I'm not insulting any console, btw. I'm just asserting that how PS2 out-hyped the Dreamcast is what set the console up for greatness, and the year's worth of momentum they were able to build, and the fact that Microsoft and Nintendo were not offering anything fundamentally different meant that there was no chance of them winning, even if MS and Nintendo had corrected others of their flaws (like if Xbox had gotten better Japanese 3rd party support, or Nintendo had embraced DVDs and online), they couldn't have done anything to take that momentum away.
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
