Bodhesatva, your point #3 gave me an evil thought: PS3 and 360 lose all identity and are seen as "budget" and "luxury" versions of the same thing. 360 is cheaper, but you might lose it all on RRoD or disc scratches!

Won't happen of course, but it was an amusing thought.

You don't even have to worry about the break downs; you can also include Blu-Ray playback.

You have a choice: buy a "toned down" version that just plays games for 300-400, or buy the "spruced up" version that also plays games, but with a built in Blu-Ray player for 500-600!

Of course, this situation isn't a happy one for either of them.  They'll keep this bloody battle going slashing each other and spending money by the truckload to try to grab each individual exclusive sequel of a last gen game.  Meanwhile, Nintendo just sits there happily making huge profits on all their systems, games (casual and core), and peripherals.  They don't have to buy games to get them, because developers have no CHOICE but to make Wii games if they want to survive the generation.  So while Sony and Microsoft create billions of dollars of deficit for their parent companies just to survive in the industry and grab old IPs, Nintendo sits back and lets the Wii and DS comfortably rake in brand new IPs and strong support from developers without lifting a finger.

I think we're more or less in agreement.

IMO the PS3 is an excelent implementation of a bad design (not at all an "engineering masterpiece"), while the 360 is a awful implementation of a pretty decent design.

And before anyone flames me about the "engineering masterpiece" thing, I'll say that the PS3 absolutely is the fulfillment of an "engineer's (wet) dream". It's one of those things that come out when us geeks literally "look at no cost". But that's not engineering - engineering is first and foremost about working with constraints.

You might be "kicking a dead horse" here, but I do agree. Such massive expenses and startup cost is the main reason Nintendo plays it safe by making a profit on hardware from day one, Sony and Microsoft can afford to be in the business even while incurring such substantial losses because they have other business units to offset those losses, SEGA was forced out of the console business (not enough cash to sustain losses) and companies like the Phantom will never amount to anything more than vaporware.

Well ... not quite.

I believe that the PS3 is a textbook example of a product that fails to take market realities into account (shortage of supplies, price), whereas the 360 is a textbook example of a product that fails. product that was not properly tested before being inflicted on the market.

So, we disagree that the 360 had a pretty decent design, because good designs don't cause massive heat death. ... You know, come to think of it, I believe that we are just using the word "design" to mean slightly different things. You know the 360 failure rate is ridiculous, yet you say it had good design. Maybe you mean just the raw hardware, not the final product design. In which case I agree with what you said here.

But in your previous post, you seemed to say that Sony's mistake was greater than Microsoft's. I disagree with that. Sony and Microsoft each made equally huge missteps in different areas of console design. I think that the kind of mistake Microsoft made is more damaging in the long term, but I concede that an intelligent person, faced with the same information, might reasonably disagree.

Whew.

[edit: In other words, Sony has better engineers, Microsoft has better marketing. Nintendo pwns all.]

[re-edit: Not very shocking when the first is a home electronics giant, and the second a computer SOFTWARE giant.]

Didn't really read most of this but I have a theory.

A lot of the "big" games that are coming to the 360/PS3 but not the Wii, are probably due to the fact that companies underestimated the Wii from the get go. If they didn't, I bet some of these big games would have gotten some dumbed down edition for the Wii, but who knows that that isn't in the works still?

Well, let's not forget the post I was replying too. This was the sentence: "They were so paranoid about 'being the most powerfull!!1!!one!!11!!eleven'." And I do think Sony really blew it that way. Sematics of design vs. implementation aside, their requirements were way too ambitious from the get-go. Microsoft, on the other hand, blew it much later in the process. Which is not to say they didn't blew it in a significantly worse way: in many ways they did.

Actually, I guess the only way Sony's sin is worse, is that Sony really did intend to "design" their console this way (with Bluray, and the Cell, and whatnot), whereas Microsoft obviously (I hope) didn't intend to "design" a faulty console.

True.

Although the swappable hard drive in the PS3 is a design move of pure genius that costs Sony little or nothing.