Best and worst business decisions that Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony made

[Parokki]

Some people don't seem to make a distinction between what's good for the company, and good for themselves. For example, the Wii not being able to use the internal memory is bad for me, but good for Nintendo due to making money on memory cards.

Nintendo

+ Not adopting HD. Best decision they've made this gen.
+ Making people want something they didn't want before.
+ Lowest developing costs.

- Friend codes are useless and annoying. Absolutely no excuse for sticking with them.
- Taking their time with adding online support.
- Not managing to convince third parties of the viability of the Wii early on.
- Underestimating demand. Nobody on the planet saw it coming, so this one is pretty theoretical...

Microsoft

+ Developing Xbox Live even futher.
+ Lots of nice stuff, but I can't divide it into separate points. =/

- Poor hardware reliability.
- Not fully taking advantage of being the first to release.
- Still making no progress in Japan.
- No hard drive by default is limiting developers.

Sony

+ Started acting a lot smarter after getting rid of Kutaragi.
+ Doing a pretty good job at emulating Xbox Live and keeping it free.
+ Adding Blu-ray might end up as a good thing. Probably not, but remains to be seen.

- Vastly overestimating the strength of brand loyalty.
- Unbeliveable amount of PR blunders.
- Including Blu-ray, and thus $200 to their launch price.