Well yes, this is absolutely true. Although is Sony's defense, they thought they were setting themselves up to collect on Bluray in the future...then along came digital distribution...which is something that nobody could have seen at the time.  

I think you're the only one that read my post...

sony also sells movies digitally you know, they have their own store, and sell their music and movies in other stores ;).

Sidious said:

4.  Giving away online for free.  Sure it made a good bullet point against Microsoft but one has to wonder if they understand how much money they have thrown away because of it.  It's much harder to make people pay for something after they're used to having it for free.  Also what happens years from now when the Playstation 3 reaches a price point where people that only buy used games pick it up and Sony still has to support them?

I was just reading about Samsung's record profits this past quarter and it begs the question, why is one of Sony's main competitors doing so well while Sony struggles in almost every market it's competing in?  Even with videogames they have to sell their system at a loss and with what must be the most expensive internal hardware just to compete.  It begs the question, do these guys even think about some of the boneheaded moves they have been making the past few years?

Here are just a few that simply make no sense:

1.  Adding Netflix to the Playstation 3 for free.  It's great that Sony seems to like to give almost everything away for free or at a loss but what was the point in pretty much handing over their marketshare leadership to Nintendo and losing so much money helping Blu-Ray if they're going to end up helping its competition for free?  Blu-Ray is one of the few bright spots for Sony, even though they're facing anger over Blu-Ray fees, so why in the World are they working against those adopting the format by supporting the competition?

Netflix is free on 360 too, you just need a gold membership. The whole Netflix deal goes sour once you figure in cost of netflix, cost of internet, and cost of xboxlive.

"It's great that Sony seems to like to give almost everything away for free or at a loss but what was the point in pretty much handing over their marketshare leadership to Nintendo and losing so much money helping Blu-Ray if they're going to end up helping its competition for free?"- What the hell are you talking about?

2.  Ensuring that the PSP relaunch was a disaster by following the same idiotic pricing mindset that already proved to be a disaster with the Playstation 3.  This was supposed to be the year that the PSP would regain momentum in North America and Europe and now we're seeing amazing low sales of both the PSP Go and PSP games.   Just looking at Gran Turismo PSP sales must be driving some third-parties that believed in the new launch to just shake their heads and wonder how they were taken yet again by Sony.

PSP did better last week than any other console except the ps3...

We also don't know what kind of legs this will have. If PSPgo ends up adding 15-16% every single week from now on, then it has served it's purpose. There are two ways to keep sales up. Drop the price, or come out with a new, different product. Nintendo does it with the expanded audience, MS does it with the many HW models and slight slight price drops they've had, and sony is doing is with the pspgo.

3.  Stating that they purposely made the Playstation 3 harder to develop for.  Was anyone at Sony not drinking the Kool-Aid long enough to realize that making it more costly and longer to develop for would also affect their own first-party game development?  Why didn't they just go with more traditional hardware that would have been cheaper and easier to develop for?  It's hard to imagine how many hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars could have been saved in the process.

This was a PR mistake, that ,obviously, was taken the wrong way by the public. I blame the translation. They didn't make it harder to develop for the sake of making it hard to develop. They made the development complex, because you can do a lot more with complex systems than easier ones. Let's use the cell as an example. Each core handles different processes. This is more complex than just having one core handling everything. However, when the information is each handled by a specialized core, they can work more efficiently, and thus, push out more performance.

4.  Giving away online for free.  Sure it made a good bullet point against Microsoft but one has to wonder if they understand how much money they have thrown away because of it.  It's much harder to make people pay for something after they're used to having it for free.  Also what happens years from now when the Playstation 3 reaches a price point where people that only buy used games pick it up and Sony still has to support them?

I agree, they could at least charge 10$ a year. With, maybe 10 million users, that could equal 100M.. that's a good chunk of change. They could throw in a free download as well or something, if they want to have a bullet point.

5.  Allowing both Nintendo and Microsoft to be in the media spotlight over their motion control schemes while Sony pitches theirs to the same crowd that already bought the Playstation 3.  When was the last time you heard anyone but the gaming media talk about Sony's motion controller?  It's supposed to be coming out in six months and it has the buzz of non-alcoholic beer.  Does someone at Sony think that Resident Evil 4 on the Wii was reponsible for that console's success because that it the only game we're even hearing much of anything about.

I think Sony knows what it is doing with their marketing. We will see a lot more about it when it comes closer to the release. No point hyping the product now, when it's at least 6 months away. Natal made a good impression on a lot of the mainstream media, but let's wait and see what kind of games and price point MS is going to market when it comes time. The strength sony has right now is their core motion tech. Wii motion+ is an uprade. Of course the people don't know this, but I know Sony will market it like this, showing exaclty what it can do, separating it from the wii controller. This is a good point you've brought up, but it's debatable.

I could go on about their rapidly growing losses in cell phones or their amazing loss of the portable music market to Apple but since this is a website devoted to videogames it goes a little too off-topic.  For those Sony supports and even other out there, is there a method to Sony's madness, and if not what is going on with them?

Apple has a huge fanbase who love their products. Apple, a lot like Nintendo, has found a huge market with a more casual market. IPhone has recently been called the worst phone of all time. There's a lot of compatibility problems with Apple's products and they are very expensive. But to the mainstream audience, that doesn't matter, it's just a fact of life.

And everyone is having trouble in those two markets, not just sony. The main problem is marketing. Sony needs some money to advertise and they don't really have enough to go around. Sony walkman and ericcson need to start advertising the way apple or any other company does in order to compete. Do you realize how much those companies spend on advertising? Apple has probably spent a billion on marketing just the ipod, and probably just as much on the iphone.

All in all a couple good points, but they are by no means the dumbest guys in the room. Some of the things you don't understand are probably understood by them. They have hundreds of accountants and specialists of al kinds and have all kinds of forms and investigation that you have no idea of. Every company is like this, not just Sony, so it's a bad idea to pass judgment on a company's intelligence when you only know maybe 1/100th of the facts and how interdependent those facts are.

How much of the Blu-ray IP do you think Sony owns?

Cause, it's probably a lot less then you think.

Even if Blu-ray does DVD numbers... Sony won't make Toshiba money off it.