I personally wonder whether Sony's focus on "10 year products" in part because if their system doesn't last "10 years" they could be in serious financial trouble ...
The PS3 and PSP are both products that had massive R&D budgets, and Sony lost billions up front due to selling the hardware at a loss. Since the PS2 was (and still is) massively popular Sony was still selling a lot of PS2 software and hardware for massive profits which minimized the impact of these losses on their financial statements.
Now, the only company who has been able to remain profitable (and thus survive) from a trailing position in the console market has been Nintendo mainly because of their massive first party software sales and super profitable gameboy line. Most companies find themself in trouble because the massive expense associated with R&D and launching a system (hardware losses and marketing costs) are never recovered in the lifetime of a console, and the longer they survive the deeper of a hole they dig for themself.
Most of us know that you can not will a console into having a long life, and that third party publishers truely determine how long a console last (by supporting it after the 'next-generation' console has been released), and they only care about the residual users on the system; and the number of residual users is largely dependant on how well the console sold.
