OK, I'm starting to get a little tired of this one liner stuff where you make no point at all.
Intel didn't sell enough chips for enough money to really want to stick around. That however, means nothing to the broad points that were in the first post.

Are you insinuating that the console market is so specific that broad advice from a market that is not all that far from the console market is invalid, or are you just arguing semantic for the sake of doing so? You are yet to actually address any point from the first post, and still keep making broad and sweeping posts that make no contribution to the discussion.

Intel is doing just fine in the PC market. After the last few years of AMD beating the crap out of them they finally shaped up and are attacking AMD on all fronts, gaining back market share. They don't really need the console market right now

The same can't be said for IBM, whole PC sales have been on the decline ever since Dell appeared.

 Which is probably why they sold their PC business to Lenovo.

IBM doesn't deal too much with the general public anymore. They work more with "middleware" i.e. servers and stuff that are relatively unknown to your average joe. They serve as infrastructure to huge corporations and websites and stuff.

Question, Wangfoo, since I candidly admit that I'm not going to listen to the whole thing:

You mention that there is value in sticking behind a product that may do poorly out of the gate. That applies fairly specifically to the PS3, I believe. Can you explain, according to your information, why this would be true?  

That Guy: Right, IBM got out of the low margin PC sector and turned their attention to higher profit corporate markets.

Bodhesatva: I'll give the example Colwell gives in the lecture

When Intel was designing the Pentium, instead of doing a new ALU, they just shrunk an old one from the 486. The shrink turned out to be flawed, and because of carelessness, it got into the general market.

This was right around the time that the internet began to boom, so people found out rather quickly that their part was broken, and began to make a fuss over the matter. Intel initially replied with "Tough luck, we decide what is broken" The public wouldn't accept that, so finally after some convincing from internal managers, there was a complete recall that cost on the order of 500 million dollars.

This ended up being a net win because Intel showed that they cared about their customers. If something was broken, they were going to go to great lengths to fix the problem to their customers satisfaction.

I'm sorry if what I said was construed as saying its good to stick behind a lame horse, thats not what I originally meant. Sony is in a tough position where they have to stick with their brand, and make drastic changes to their thought process next time around. What is important is making your brand be known as one of quality. That means swallowing the money if it means a complete recall to repair the problem so that it is no longer an issue.

In the console industry, I look at this is a major problem for a few consoles. Firstly, Microsoft should have long solved this issue, and did a complete voluntary recall on broken machines, and made sure the problem was addressed so that the public would consider it a dead issue. Obviously, they spent a long time battling the issue, and have yet to really admit to the overwhelming severity. The 3 year warranty was a good step towards this, but perhaps not far enough.

With Sony, its a harder issue. The PS3 doesn't have the same kind of thing where the public is up in arms with hardware failure. The current problem is that the public just doesn't want to pay for the product. Thats more of an issue of Sony not picking their market explicitly.

For this I will give a different example from the lecture. Itanium has pretty much failed for a few reasons. One of the larger reasons is that they literally tried to target everything from the beginning. They planned to have an architecture that would encompass everything from mobile to desktop to workstation to server. The problem with doing this is that these areas have vastly different demands, and the workstation market, which was to be one of the major focuses of the initial Itanium chip, was wiped out before the chip launched. With such a broad focus, they could only manage to do at best OK on each area, and not excel in any area.

For PS3, I see this being similar in its problem with its identity to consumers. Its priced like a high end video equipment piece, but its being marketed to a predominately cheap video game market. It just doesn't have a strong focus to reach its core market.

I see the problem with blu-ray being that SCE took a huge risk to put the playstation brand marked with blu-ray, with no real benefit for the playstation brand. It would have been at best a small win for SCE, and a huge win to another area.

Finally, they didn't take notice to technology being second to marketability. No one cares about how impressive Cell is on paper. Its solely about the games, regardless of the tech.