Does the Wii prove that the HD razor/blade model is flawed?

[Squilliam]

MaxwellGT2000 said:

bdbdbd said:
@raygun: Wii has easilly 18 games i want to buy. That's to add to the more than 18 games i already own for it.

You know, you may not notice but you just pointed out the stupidity in Sonys strategy. Since you obviously want to watch BD; if PS3 didn't have BD player in it, you had bought a BD player to go with your 16 BD:s. Now Sony sold you a BD player they made loss with, instead of selling a standalone player that had been sold at a profit. Sounds like they lost money twice with selling you the PS3.

Interesting way to look at it, though Sony had a lot of money invested into Blu-ray so it had to trump HD-DVD, best way to do that is offer a way for people to get a multipurpose device that is significantly better than just a HD DVD player and so a PS3 sold at a loss to customers not only let them have HD movies but games as well.  A much better investment for consumers, and in turn, a way to keep a leg up on HD-DVD.

Panasonic is the one who really benefited from Sony's decision to put Blu Ray in the PS3 because they another significant patent holder and they didn't lose as much money getting the format onto its feet. Also its quite probable that Panasonic profited from Sony's decision as their patents are focused on the player technology itself so getting a lot of players out there is a lot of royalty payments to Panasonic whereas Sony's Blu Ray fabrication in only just approaching break even now with a LOT of money invested in plant capital which will still need to be depreciated over the coming years. Sony makes their royalty money more on selling a lot of Blu Ray discs.

As computers are moving away from Blu Ray as a medium for transfering files because online distribution and flash discs are taking off for their ease of use, they will not sell nearly in the same league the quantity of burnable write once or rewriteable discs as DVD.

So even if you say that Blu Ray was an effective part of Sony's Razor/blade strategy, they may not be the biggest winner from their own strategy.