Former Xbox boss Robbie Bach has claimed that some of the Xbox 360’s success is due, in part, to Sony’s failings this generation. The PS3 platform holder’s mistakes helped give Microsoft the edge, according to his comments at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network event.
“Some of the success of Xbox was due to the fact that Sony did some really not so smart things,” he stated. “They mismanaged their 70% market share. It’s a long conversation. The transition to PlayStation 3 was really, really bad. And really hard.
“They mismanaged their partners, they mismanaged their cost structure. They made their next platform so complicated that developers couldn’t develop for it.”
There’s no doubt that Sony faltered early on this generation, with an exclusionary price point, confused marketing, and lackluster library. Sony had a lot of hubris coming in from the PlayStation 2 era, and it learned the hard way that it couldn’t just slap its brand name on a system and dominate. That said, Sony’s still chugging along, and hopefully it learned its lessons. Guess we’ll find out soon enough.
Robbie Bach’s four startup lessons from Xbox and Zune [GeekWire]
