The PS3 will be a failure?

Wired has a quite interesting article about PS3 and Sony. Will the PS3 blow gamers away or is it just a big fiasco? Is the $600 price too much for the customers? It seems that all those delays and negative publicity for Sony (Sony BMG antipiracy software etc) will not gave the flawless launch for the PS3. Longer you wait for something, the higher your expectations become, that is a fact!

Delays are nothing new in tech, but Sony seemed intent on making the worst of it. The crowd was kept waiting nearly an hour. Then Kaz Hirai, who heads PlayStation in North America, took the stage to declare, “The next generation doesn’t start until we say it does!” He meant it as a dig at Microsoft, but to gamers who’d been salivating for a year, his words were like a bitch slap. The demos that followed were no more impressive than those the year before. Finally, PlayStation chief Ken Kutaragi came forward to make the one announcement everyone wanted to hear: the price. $600 for the high-end model? The room gasped, then fell silent. Almost immediately, the blogosphere lit up with denunciations: Sony has turned its back on gamers. The PS3 will be a failure. Kutaragi and Hirai are idiots.

PR fiascoes tend to be a sign that nobody’s thinking about the customer. E3 was Sony’s second in seven months. Last October, a security researcher reported on his blog that CDs from Sony BMG – the music label half-owned by Sony – contained antipiracy software that covertly embedded itself in computer operating systems, spying on their owners and leaving the machines themselves vulnerable to identity theft and zombie takeover attempts. Sony BMG pooh-poohed the problem and released a software fix that made it even worse. Millions of CDs had to be recalled. As class actions multiplied and even the Department of Homeland Security warned music labels against undermining computer security, angry consumers declared themselves ready to boycott anything with the Sony name on it.

Source: Wired