I love it! Sony are finally paying for their arrogance.

is it luck or is it strategy, i think its the ladder,  MS played the crisis to it advantage.  Sony on the other... eh id rather not get into it.

What else can i say?
I saw godlike Xbox 360

^^^sony can't play it to their advantage cause the damn yen is much higher/stronger than last year

It is very difficult to play a financial crisis to one's advantage, particularly when practically no-one understands what is going on or how weak conditions will be. It is common to lower prices when things are weak, the interesting part here is that neither of Microsoft's competitors were going to lower price - Nintendo because it already has excess demand and Sony because they are already selling below cost. In that regard it could have been a strategic move, however I suspect their pricing plans were considered well before we knew how bad the economy was.

Everyone with a brain knew this was comming.  I'm sure that Microsoft had it planned months in advance, but seeing the trouble they may have waited longer than that initially wanted to.

@Picko I think we should keep it as we have no idea if MS did play the economy right, you're from Australia so you wouldn't understand.

The economy did shock a lot of people, however as Cueil said yes in NA people were expecting a recession. However we had no idea how big it was going to be. Check this link http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-02-28-bush_N.htm from Febuary 2008 well before E-Day (when we figured out how much shit we were in) If a president says we're not in a recession chances are he's lying or else why would he bring up the word recession in the first place?

Whilst you were looking at my profile you should've also checked out my occupation. I'm more than qualified to understand regardless of where I live :)

It's not so much whether people expected a recession or not, but the extent of it. Three months ago few people expected what we have now and even today few people are sure just how bad things could get.

Yeah because we're in Australia we have no idea what's happening..

That said we aren't in as much shit as America although our dollar has tumbled from 90 US cents to around 60 US cents in the last couple of months so.. yeah..

^Agreed however that still doesn't change my stance on that there is a chance Microsoft did see this coming and try to plan a strategy to turn the recession to their favor, but had no idea of the impact such strategy would create.

However, I'm just a violin student at a music conservatory so when it comes to real economics I don't know much at all and even less about businesses in general. Being an economist yourself is it common for companies to make such moves or is it considered too big a risk/too much unknown?