| Mr Khan said: I'm not saying that Sony would *never* win if its competitors were competent, just that the appearance that Sony wins 3/4 generations as walk-off home-runs is more due to what the competitors do wrong than what Sony does right. Sony is responsible for the good performance of the PlayStation, but they are not responsible for turning consumers away from their competitors. |
I have to agree that your opinion seems somewhat naive. Maybe thats not the right word, maybe myopic?
First off there are a lot of "ifs" in your theory, funny thing is; if you wanna run by that logic then every victory across every feild was based on the fact that this wouldn't have been the case if something else wasn't.
The problem with that is that these things (especially with consoles) don't happen overnight and aren't spur of the moment decisions. Lots of planning goes into these things. I can gaurantee you that any company that is spending billions in R&D and manufacturing is taking what they are doing seriously. The foundations of there strategies may be collectively flawed, but they took what they were doing seriously regardless.
If one company succeeds and becomes more successful than the rest, its unfair to trivialize their achievements by saying eg. "Sony PS1 wouldn't have won if nintendo put a disc drive in their console instead of a catridge". Fundamentally, that statement, in hindsight may be very true, but both companies had a vision as to where they saw their consoles going, one was right and one was wrong so one won and one lost. That is basically how everything works.
Take your MS exacple for instance, you say MS should have taken making the XBO dev friendly as a priority. What MS did is basically make a direct iteration of 360 2.0. The took every hardware aspect of the 360 and directly improved on it and improced on their cooling to arrive at the XBO. The XBO is basically what a 360 would have been if it was made in 2013. Its as easy to develop for as the 360 was to develop for, the reason it looks like they have done something "wrong" now, is just that the PS4 is not only easier to develop for than a PS3, its also easier to develop for than the XBO. MS made remarkable hardware with the XBO taking into account factors that they felt would define the design of their architecture. And sony did the same.
The simple truth here is that if comparing the PS4/XBO, it just goes to show one thing, sony are just all round beter at making hardware (this should be expected). Sony has always made great playstation hardware, their hardware has just never before now put how games are actually made first. For the first time, sony and MS set out to make the same kinda hardware, no naturally the company better at making hardware would shine here. So should we say, XBO will be winning now if sony weren't as good hardware manufacturers?
