Why all the Sony hate?

[Sullla]

I don't feel anything even remotely close to "hate" for Sony, or any of the three console manufacturers. They're all just corporations; I'm not sure why one would feel the need for a strong like/dislike of any of them. In the last generation, I owned a PS2 and a Gamecube; I barely touched the Gamecube, since it didn't have many games that interested me. PS2 easily saw 95% of my console gaming time. If I've bought a Wii so far, it's simply because it has the games that most interested me - nothing more or less than that.

I criticize Sony (and Microsoft, for that matter) not because I'm some kind of raging Nintendo fan, but because I think that they have very poor business strategies. I could really care less about who produces "good" games, as I joined this website to discuss sales trends and the business side of gaming. I've posted at length elsewhere about why I feel that Sony's market share "sell at a loss strategy" makes turning a profit impossible over the long haul. I'm not gloating over this, just pointing out that with Sony's business model, sooner or later they were going to get creamed in the market. It caught up to them with the PS3, which will never turn a profit and has already wiped out all the gains of the PS1/2 halcyon days. The console market is so volatile, it was almost inevitable that this would happen at some point.

Most of my scorn is reserved for those who ignore the massive amount of sales data piling up in front of them, then go off into fantasy land and predict some kind of wild swing in the console race. Such a turnaround would not only be unprecedented, with zero antecedents from the last 25 years of gaming, but flies in the face of all logic and common sense. Yet so-called "analysts" continue to do this over and over again, apparently unable to see the forest for the trees. A class of five-year olds could look at the sales data we have on this site and see who's going to do the best this generation. You know, the console that's sold out everywhere and has outsold its two rivals combined 23 out of 26 weeks this year. But analysts are too close to the source; they will prattle on about HD adoption rates, AAA exclusive titles to come out at ____ date, downloadable content, and so on, while the sales data continues to make fools out of them.

It doesn't bother me much when Sony or Microsoft fans paint unrealistically optimistic projections for their consoles; they're just doing this for fun. But industry analysts should know better, and when they continue to misread the market over and over again, I have nothing but disdain for these "professionals." Maybe this is slightly off-topic, but that's where most of my "hate" is concentrated.