I originally wrote this as a response to one of Jimbo Sterling's posts. Since I don't have any blog posts on Dtoid yet; this took me a while to type up; and I'm tired of seeing, "'You suck. Start a blog. ...' by God" on my Dtoid sidebar, I figured I'd throw this out there on the C-blogs.

This is how I see things:

The PS3 was built to be "future-proof" for quite some time - 10 years, right?. The thing is, Microsoft will come out with a new Xbox in 2, 3, 4 years, somewhere in there. The 360 is a powerful machine and the graphics, for most games I've seen, are pretty comparable to the PS3's. The 360 costs about $100 less. The way I see it, Microsoft will make sure that the 360 will ALWAYS cost about $100 less. That gives Microsoft a permanent price advantage. Things are pretty even at this point; that's when Sony's Blu-ray steps in to claim "superiority" as a system. However, when Microsoft is ready to launch its next system, the PS3 will finally be at a price that average people might be willing/able to pay for a console. In addition, the PS3 will be halfway through its life cycle. Microsoft, being a relatively smart company, will launch the new system for not too much more than the price of a PS3. The new system will have even more capabilities than the PS3 in terms of graphics, sound, hard drive, multimedia, internet, full backwards compatibility, etc. Who knows - maybe it'll even have a Blu-ray drive, since the "format wars" will (hopefully) be over and the price of technology should decrease significantly by that time. Microsoft's new system will basically be what the 360 kinda wants to be now - a game-playing media hub - but it will succeed to this end much more than the 360 or PS3. That gives Microsoft the advantage in virtually every way. While Sony is still developing the PS4, which won't be due out for another 5 years at that time, Microsoft will be selling it's new system like hotcakes, and also working on their next system - which will probably be released at the same time as the PS4. Microsoft wins because of two main reasons: 1) They were able to sell two consoles in the same period that Sony sold one. 2) Microsoft's new technology will be more powerful and fairly priced (compared to the PS3 launch).

Does anyone agree?

(BTW, I don't know where Nintendo is in all of this but I don't consider them "direct competition", as far as the markets they're aiming for, against Microsoft and Sony.)