When Life Gives You Lemons… Squish Them.

Ramblings

One thing I’ve always found interesting is that the big businesses – the ones that are worth billions and billions of dollars – never seem to miss a beat. A new trend emerges and you can bet that world-wide giants like Microsoft and Google are going to have some kind of product designed to capitalize on that market.

Well, what happens when one of these mega-corporations makes a mega-mistake? Simple: you cut the crap and get to it, as a friend of mine would say. Let’s use Sony as an example here: The PS3 has been a world-wide success, kind of. Sales are low when compared to the XBOX 360 or the Nintendo Wii, yet the executives are confident in the PS3’s long term success. Why? Because they’re slowly shifting their marketing focus.

Whereas the XBOX is known only as a video game machine, the PS3 is being marketed as a complete home entertainment solution. My PS3, for example, plays blu-ray discs, divX, DVD’s, MP3’s, CD’s, many forms of memory cards (via an attachable USB card reader), and looks might impressive while doing it. In fact, the sheer processing power of this console is nothing short of extra-ordinary, and trust me, blu-ray is everything that it’s being hyped up to be (at least from a users point of view).

Is the PS3 a flop? At the moment, from a gaming perspective, yes. The hardware and software sales are low, and that’s something that Sony is working to correct. But let’s look at it from a different perspective: is the PS3 a flop when compared with blu-ray functionality? No. Recent polls have shown that blu-ray is outselling HD-DVD 2:1, and a large portion of blu-ray receivers are Sony Playstation 3’s. Interesting how that works…

The point that I’m trying to make is that Nintendo and Microsoft hit Sony hard with both of their consoles, yet the PS3 remains a viable and attractive entrant in the market because Sony took the lemons that Nintendo handed them and found another use for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if future consoles would up being able to handle everything from surround sound to video processing all in one tidy package.

Besides, lemonade is overrated.

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