Outspoken Sony UK man David Reeves is all about the hardware. Making a thinly veiled swipe at Microsoft and the Xbox 360, Reeves has stated that “shoddy” machinery is not how this market grows. It’s all about quality electronics.
“… Another thing we have committed to for supporting market growth is putting out quality hardware — you don’t grow the market by putting out shoddy machines,” he boasts. “So we try to make sure that PS3s have a failure rate of just two to three percent, which is very low by industry standards.”
To be fair, Reeves isn’t one to just rag on the competition, praising Nintendo for having “only done good things” and even Microsoft for bringing down its prices and building online “in a meaningful way.” Classy man. But he still thinks the high powered hardware of the PS3 is the way to go.
In a way, he’s right to say what he says. At least compared to the Xbox 360 as a machine, the PlayStation 3 is magnificent. We just installed one here last night and I love it. However, Sony has sat back and beamed about its hardware for two years while doing very little else. I think the downfall of Sega and even Nintendo in the past went to show that hardware is NOT how you get ahead in this market, it’s software.
As the company that developed the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, you’d think Sony would understand how important a strong, varied and well publicized library would be. The PS3 has games, this is true, but nobody knows it — because Sony won’t shut up about the hardware.
