History contains the sum total of all knowledge we have on any given subject. Any prediction of the future is based on knowledge which we have gleaned from the past, or it is based on faith. Believe it or not, some people managed to use knowledge, not faith, to predict Nintendo's success this generation.

that is my case in point ringo. Who is to say that you are the one using knowledge?

On a side note, I would like to see the people who used knowledge that this scenario would happen after the gamecube despite the wii pretty much upending every single analyst and investor.

Also as a side note, thousands upon thousands of people use very well documented and well founded evidence all the time are are proven wrong time and time again by the way things turn out.

Also: some of the biggest and most important/in depth science predictions are/were based on faith lol.
Hell quantum physics is pretty much all "if, then" based.

You do realize that the Cell is not some magnificent all powerful processor, right?  I mean, many newer PC processors are much more powerful.  The Cell is good at physics and mathematical calculations, but does not even compete with the Nvidia Video cards using CUDA technology.  That is where the real Folding@Home is done.  The PS3 barely does 1000 points a day, while an 8800 or 200 GTX series video card will do many times that!  I highly doubt that the military or any private contract would choose to use the IBM made Cell for anything.  They'd much rather use the better stuff like I mentioned.

I believe one of the main problems is that they keps producing the PS2 and released the PS3. Either you do one or the other else you'll be selling three consoles, the PS3, the PS2 and the PSP. Consumers wont buy all three, max two and if done they wont bother buying the other one later, or atleast for some time.

This is all old news anyways. Things should be brighter for Sony next year. Their lineup is promising and so is the competition, all of which is only good for us, really.

1. Sean Malstrom is well known, and even though many would disagree with some of his points and predictions, he did predict Nintendo's success, and he backed up his prediction with reasons rooted in business theory. Here's another:

http://lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre-innovation-strategy.html

He guards himself against actually predicting success (another one wary of absolutes), but he does understand how Nintendo's strategy could lead to great success.

Edit: I could also add that having all this knowledge doesn't mean that it is applied correctly. You make the same mistake as much of the industry by using the Gamecube as a predictor of Wii's success. People should have been using the DS as the predictor of how Wii would perform.

2. This is a matter of our knowledge being incomplete. Nowhere did I assert that past knowledge is complete, since it would be absurd to suggest that humans have ever been omniscient. I only asserted that past knowledge is all we have to make reasonable predictions, and anything else is useless guesswork.

3. I think you're confusing theory for faith. A theory is based on past experiences and observations and then experiments are usually designed to support the veracity of the theory. I doubt you'd find many physicists who agree with your assertion that quantum physics is based on faith rather than rigorous mathematics and experimentation.

Ok we need to stop these threads its fucking annoying . . . sony was drinking its own kool aid and was way too cocky

This is getting way too much in depth. I asked that first question rhetorically, of course there will be someone that does predict it, but among the rather large majority of people, nobody could possibly have guessed correctly. (Like you said, even he doesn't completely jump in the water. He estimated, and saw how things could work, but was not someone who said it will work.)

The quantum physics things is where things get sticky. Most of it is based completely on past results and assumptions, none of it is concretely proven, and the science itself deals in things that can almost never be proven, or at least not within our lifetimes. Belief in something that cannot be proven? Sounds like faith to me.

No one predicted the Wii would sell like bread and butter, Nintendo didn't even predict it.

 And you're confused again. You don't see the distinction between proof and evidence. Proof exists almost exclusively in mathematics and logic, while evidence is where we get most of our useful knowledge from. None of our physics are proven, they just have a large body of evidence supporting them. That doesn't mean that our acceptance that physics theories are largely correct is faith. We have a lot of evidence to back it up.

People who predicted Wii's failure looked at market share and brand power and left it at that. The few who predicted Wii's success looked at a wider body of evidence. Business theories like blue ocean and disruption. I disagree with your assertion that evidence is useless in predicting the future. A person who looks at more evidence before making a prediction will tend to be more accurate than somebody who throws darts at a sheet of random numbers.

I'm not asking for proof that this generation will last ten years, because I know that nobody can give me that. I'm asking for evidence, and so far, I've been the only person to put some on the table.

This is why I'm saying this is getting too in depth. Lets scrap this whole "proof" and "evidence" argument for the moment, because at first I was merely trying to demonstrate how nothing can be completely proven.

My original point was that you said things were not going to change unless "magic" happened. You said it in response to some dude saying something like "sony knows stuff and they will win". A good battle to fight, but yes you are talking in absolutes because magic is not real.

Him: sony will win
You: No they won't

I'm just pointing out what you are doing.

You then back up your statement by stating previous trends. Then, I say that evidence only matters to whichever side you look at it from. Then I made the quantum physics analogy, so let's pick back up there.

You can pretty much show anything from looking at certain slices of data. Who predicted that Nintendo would use Blue Ocean theory? Who would have thought that SMG would be such a groundbreaking game 4 years ago? Who would've thought that Wii fit would one of the top selling games before the wii came out? These are my points. I'm not talking about "Who would have known that the Wii would be successful?" but I'm talking about "Who would've thought that Nintendo would try something like the Wii"

I'm talking about unestablished data or even just simply, poor data.

Now, the reason I am talking about unestablished data is because the very first objection I had to your statements was that you cannot predict a trend using only video game history. I did not mention it but maybe I should have. It is far too short a time and with very little data to make any accurate prediction. Stats and theory work very well because they are repeatable and have vast amounts of data.

Obviously you can use established theory and  statistics to see what might happen in the future, but you cannot predict what will exactly happen between now and then.

Anything, really, anything can happen, and to think to the contrary is a little blind. Even though it is well supported, even you showed how your "predictor" did not fully stick with his prediction. All anything can have is varying degrees of potential.