Honestly I don't think it's either. I think it's them simply acknowledging the current situation and acting accordingly. I mean, despite the great games, awesome online, a price $50 below the lowest PS3 model (in the current crappy economic conditions), and the clearance sale, they still can't outsell the PS3 in their strongest territory. What else do you suggest they do? It's not desperation, it's reality.

If that's the case then the price drop is undeniably out of desperation because absolutely no successful company will ever reduce the cost of a product and intentionally make less money off of every unit sold unless they feel that they have to in order to keep the product successful for the future.

   But Sony IS making money on Blu Ray, on TVs and HD equipment and on tons of other things the Playstation brand helps drive.  Sony is an electronics manufacturer so taking a loss on the PS3 to make a big gain in other areas (format war, HD adoption ect) is very different then Microsofts position.  Microsoft doesn't really make anything except for bad software for PCs.  They don't sell TVs, they don't sell recievers, they don't sell speakers.  They only thing they do sell is theZune and the 360.  Microsoft is not making that 6 billion up in other areas, they have no real gain here in the short or even the medium term.  Unless the Windows thing turns itself around with Vista/Windows 7 doing better eventually they will be forced to pull the plug on the video game division.

   If you want to know the real reason MS is making a console its pretty simple.  Friday I browsed the internet on my iphone and found a map to take me where I needed to go.  I looked up movie reviews and show times, bought tickets over my iphone and went.  Then I got home and streamed movies from a network hard drive to my PS3 and bought a few episodes of Rescue me (great show) on my PS3 to watch.  I did a ton of things that 5 years ago would have been done on a PC and didn't have to boot up a PC once to do them.

   Eventually noone will need windows since they'll have iphone type mobile devices, consoles (not necesarily video game consoles, could be stuff like the Apple TV too) with enhanced capabilities connected to the TV and internet browser based web aplications with ever increasing functionality.  All of those things Microsoft would currently have to compete with (and they tend to fail at doing that in making multimedia devices or mobile operating systems, in making web applications and search engines, everything outside office and windows has been a complete 3rd place or worse failure).  So what they are trying to do is leverage the monopoly money into other areas to knock competitors out while they have the money advantage so they can monopolize the new tech frontiers too and feed us more of the same Windows/IE/office crap at hyper inflated prices.  Ever bought a retail legit version of Vista?  It was 400 dollars or more at release.  That is cheap for Office which can get near 1000 dollars if you buy the whole set.  Microsoft doesn't just develop monopolies, they develop then exploit them with the most extreme price gouging of any company I can think of.

   The 360 is only one front in the global war to monopolize outside the PC OS/office market but here's hoping the failure continues.  I can't immagine the horror of a Windows Vista quality....everything.

I think the price cut is part of the plan from the start. Last year they shipped 360's with different CPUs on the motherboard getting a cost savings so they passed that along to up sales...

This year the GPU has been changed, again saving money so they will pass the cut along to consumers so they can again push more product.

Next year they intend to combine the CPU and GPU on one chip, and again they will cut the cost and again pass that along...

What is so desparate about a natural part of the console cycles, which is... Cutting costs and driving the price down to a mark where they can sell more units? Sony is doing it too... Cut costs, slash prices.

Screwing the customer???

Did you $ony fanboys forget the PS3 launch?

60 gig- 600$

20 gig - 500$


People still bought them only to be screwed several weeks later when the newer version came out

Then the 80 gig replaced the 60 gig and shed off a extra 100$ and the poor 20 gig owners got screwed cause they paid 100$ more and 50% less hard drive space than the 40 gig

Lmao who got screwed now?

 If you want to try and flame a group of fanboys you could try doing the bare minimum of research. The launch systems were the best models. The only thing the 20gb really lacked was wireless ability but other than that it is in everyway superior to the 80 and 40 gb units save for mostly meaningless hard drive space. If you really wanted to try and start a flame war you would make some references to the diminished feature list of the PS3 rather than whatever non-sense you put together. I miss the good old days when trolls really went the extra mile to earn the slew of angry responses.

Im having a hard time judging this move. Microsoft seems to have cut the price many times now. I wonder if they will go below 150$.

The launch systems were the best system in YOUR OPINION.

Now just cause you stated your OPINION that means im wrong?

No they still were ripped off.

Also it does not matter about the features,When MS lowered the Price of the 360 for the premium to 300$,people said that they were screwing the customer.