d21lewis said:
I don't agree with your analogy. The generation went on for 8 years before the successors hit the market. M$ was only out one year longer than PS3 and only sold about 5.5m during that first year. They wanted to sell 10 million before the PS3 released but that didn't happen *. There was a "Dreamcast effect" where people just wanted to see what Sony offered before buying. In every reveal, the PS3 looked to be a better system in every way, showing demos that looked better than anything the Xbox 360 was showing. AND it had fancy Wii like motion controls. You remember Sony saying "Next gen doesn't start until we say so".
And even then, Sony didn't surpass Xbox until after the PS4 and Xbox One were released *. And even that came at a huge financial cost.
There's a quote I read in a magazine that I can't find anywhere but it stayed in my mind. It was something like: Sony: "Their lead doesn't matter. We've been in this position before. Dreamcast first, PS2 later. PS1 first, N64 later. It doesn't matter what they sell. We'll quickly overtake them and it will be business as usual." And they had every right to feel that way. It was historically accurate. No matter what the competition did, Sony crushed them. They outsold the competition by five times during the 6th gen.
If you were running the 100m against Usain Bolt and he gave you a 15m head start and you barely lost by seconds even after blowing your hamstring early in the race (subtle RRoD analogy, there), that's actually something to be proud of. I'd say a better analogy would be Rocky vs Apollo Creed. Despite having nobody believing in him, Rocky went toe to toe with the champ. He didn't even belong in the same ring. He fought an amazing fight, almost won, and stole our hearts.
Then later, Mr. T easily beat the hell out of him and killed his manager.
*Sales figures are from memory. May not be 100% accurate.
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