In 15 years, there's a chance that we will look back and think this strategy paid off but it's unlikely. Sony screwed up, end of story. That doesn't mean the console is bad or that you can own one and enjoy it but they screwed up from a business standpoint by forfeiting their Playstation dominance in favor of a physical media when physical media is slowly dying.
We as consumers won out on the deal, though. Especially those who bought in later when the PS3 was $3-400. We get a great BD player built into a solid gaming console at a fair price.
When you look around and see companies like Apple completely ignoring the existence of Blu-Ray and selling more and more Macs every year while the rest of the computer industry stagnates, you realize just how few people really care about Blu-Ray. And Macs aren't juse expensive computers, they're top of the line equipment. And even the people dropping $2k on a friggin' laptop don't give a shit about Blu-Ray tech! The average consumer gives slightly more of a shit about Blu-Ray than they do about completely ignored tech like 3D televisions (not coincidentally, these two techs are tied at the hip).
In an age where I can go buy a high definition movie digitally from 50 different sources or I can just go pirate the damned thing if I really want to be a bastard, physical media is never going to come close to the dominance it saw during the CD and DVD eras.
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