I'm not familiar with their service, but I love their products. Also, Samsung is a big part of SONY's LCD production. They make quite a large percentage of their panels I think.

More like Sony copies their LCD's.

Who said the  Sony's gaming division is killed thru Blue-Ray?...the previous Xbox which came with a Hard-Drive had lost billions summing up to 25-26 mn units sold world-wide and that didn't hurt the M$'s gaming division. Nintendo had bad times with Game-Cube as well. And now they are enjoying.

Well PS3 isn't out from the race, it's slowly climbing up in the H/W sales with the price-tag that remained the biggest constraint so far until September. The Console's sales have stabilised to 240-250K in World-wide Weekly and it definitely has the potential to pick up steam and end 2nd place this gen. You are just cherry-picking few instances to make the closest rival 360 look like the profitable and even bragging abt the M$ money which can keep the console still in the market. Nintendo without doubt are making insane money and all the credits goes to their marketing strategies.

Sony just needs PS3 selling as currently as it is(thanx to the Slim) and not PS4 to make up for the inital losses incurred thru production costs. Giving away free isn't a stupid strategy, Wii has it as well. It is a competition that's asking for the challenge.

It made the console $599, and since 360 shares much of its library, which console do you think most people preferred, until the recent price cut and Slim launch, the 360 was beating the PS3.

Yeah its climbing, until MS cuts another $100 off the 360, then either Sony loses even more money or goes back to third place.

The only way Sony can keep the PS3 selling like it is, is if they continue to lose money on the PS3, because that's the only way they'll be able to counter MS's future price cuts.

Samsung service it's shit, and so are their products.
while the give the image of being better quality their products are built of cheap things that break in a month.

by experience my LCD only lasted a month, and they had to repair it, after repairs it still not picking channels like it should. and they don't want to exchange it.

they don't make bad panels, but their consumer service it's below average.

my panel doesn't have a single death pixel yet, but it stopped tuning channels after a month on use, and after the repair everything turned green HDMI , component and cable.

it went for 3 check ups until they repaired it when i was asking for a exchange. and the guy was idiot to my cousin when she went to pick the TV.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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 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?

You're joking right. Do you follow HDTV? Samsung is considered the leader in PQ/price ratio amongst top end HDTVs and their LN52B750 has destroyed the competition this year in the LCD market, and is already a shoe in for "best traditional LCD of all time" without even hitting its second wave of releases.

Sure, with Sammy you play the panel lottery, but you do that with EVERY brand. With Sony, you get worse PQ in most cases at a much higher price, so WTF are you talking about? Are you just using your personal experience when you make those statements, or what?

@OP

Excellent post. People don't like negative things being said about Sony, but everything you've said is not only well thought out, it's absolutely true, and even Sony would agree with it, I'm afraid.