I believe this is the one area where sony has always been lacking when it comes to the Playstation. With the PS3, it was about too many shallow (at least to the consumer) "stability updates" and not enough features and with teh PS4 its fewer stability updates and what appears to be 1 or two feature adding updates per year.
I have always been lenient on sony when it comes to their OS cause well, sony is not natively a software company so I was cutting them some slack. But come on, they had the whole of the PS3 gen to get their act right and while they are at least innovating with OS based features and services, they are still behind MS when it comes to how these things are implemented.
With sony, whenever they annouce a new feature, there is always that feeling at the back of my head that it won't just work properly off the mark but eventally stabilize and start working right. And they are very very very slooooow to add features to the system.
One thing I will give to MS, is that they are shameless. They are willing to do anything to win. This is great for their consumers and their brand as a whole. Cause if they see something that looks good on the other side, they will at least make sure their box has it. Sony? not so much.
I think sony should adopt an firmware preview system like Ms does. Get a group of about a 300k people that gets staggered early access to upcoming firmware. Let those people iron out the bugs and issues and get everything working right. Let those people be the first line of suggestions for exactly what the consumer want in addition to whatever else they want to add in. But sony goes about their OS firmware like they are still in 2006. Every single company that makes anything like an OS has a beta programme for a reason.
And while I appreciate that they at least added features to 2.0, and that most of the features they added were stuff a lot of people had been asking for, I can't help but feel there are some really obvious things that they stil leave out. The one I find most puzzling is the lack of video playback. How is it possible that an 8yr old console launched with full video playback support and yet the PS4 lacks this.
Another thing that I found really puzzling, is the very way the OS is structured. Like have they learnt nothing? It think it would have been easier for them to basically make a blank OS with sytem covering APIs and concentrate only on system wide feature like share(stuff), gameDVR and an app engine. Then basically open the OS to third party support. Games should basially be run like apps as they are now but everything esle should too. So that way rather than them having to release a firmware update everytime they want to add a new app or them working on a media player for the console, they could leave that to third party developers.
I would even be willing to pay as much as $10 for some of the apps i have in mind.
