I wouldn't say failure, but it did not live up to sales expectations early in it's lifecycle. The slower sales of the system early in the lifecycle made it take longer for the internal tech in the PS3 to come down in price, thus it took Sony a lot longer to turn a profit than investors expected. So I could see how in a business sense this could be considered a failure when they may have turned a profit much sooner if they put more "off the shelf" parts into the PS3.
But... By loosing money with the product they also pushed the adoption of the Bluray player, which is good for Sony. Unfortunately with how popular streaming has become in recent years not as many people have adopted the Bluray format as many of us expected. Heck I stream at least 90% of the movies/tv shows I watch. I think I only watched two Bluray movies last year.
