U made good points but it will be really hard, guess only time will tell.

The reasoning of the OP is ridiculous.

I don't need to explain if a person can't see that with a quick glance, they definately won't understand why.

So basically: 10 year plan, marathon not a sprint. Got ya.

Tretton would be proud, soldier.

Ah yes, the mythical 10-year cycle that can somehow make a product sell for a decade straight. If only markets actually worked that way, huh?

Quick economics lesson: products go through a cycle of demand that's based off of consumer interest, not supplier intentions. This cycle tends to start slow, reach a peak, and drop off. For video game consoles, this peak tends to hit around the second or third year on the market, and the drop-off is usually quite severe after that unless the product is in particularly high demand (such as the NES or PS2, which remained high sellers even after their peak years). The short of this is that the only way a product can have a 10-year life cycle is if the product actually remains in demand for 10 years. And whether or not this will happen is usually pretty obvious within about 2 years of the product being on the market, as long as there's competition to compare it to.

The PS3 is not following the same type of sales cycle as the PS2 or NES. Instead of starting slow and going meteoric, its sales have started slow and risen at a more or less average pace. It's closer to the sales cycle of the GameCube and original XBOX. Meaning that it will all but definitely drop off within the next year and a half, possibly in a quite dramatic fashion, due to the primary userbase interested in the system having already picked the system up.

So why would the PS3 be able to do what the PS2 could not, after being a broken shell of a console compared to the PS2 (sales-wise)?

The PS2 has had a more successful "10 year" life cycle than the PS3 will ever have, and as you can see it is really struggling in its 8th year to garner sales, as they've dropped significantly from last year.  And its 9th and 10th years will be dysmal even if Sony drops the price.

The only way I see the OP's prediction becoming true is if there's a worldwide ban on white plastic declared in 2011 effectively bringing the Wii's sales to zero.

Who knows it could happen...

OMG. Worst. Reasoning. Evar...

As much as I don't think the PS3 will beat the Wii I also think people are incorrectly putting previous generation trends on the PS3 lifetime graph. I really think that the initial launch was more of a preview launch and that if they play their cards right, Sony can have a mass market launch later on. The peak will then come 2-3 years after this point (I'm guessing Christmas 2010.) Sony's name and the extra technology behind the system will keep it from feeling stale for those adopters of the mass market launch.

Or logic for that matter.

Or Nintendo finally releases different colored Wii's and sales sky rocket even further. =P