Effort to outsell? Yeah, that's the business world. Honestly though - let's look at how the game played out so far. Microsoft sucker-punched Sony and they took the bait hard. Let's review.
1. MS wanted to take out at least a 20% market share on their next generation box, the 360. 2. So they leveraged their PC hardware contacts and built the best system they could manufacture based on current technology. 3. Sony, never one to be outdone on a hardware platform, went and built something so advanced it couldn't even be reliably manufactured for the first two years. This meant they were selling $2000 hardware for $600 and being crapped on by consumers for price-gouging. Not an enviable position to be in.
The result? Nintendo pulled a ninja miracle by betting on the wii and XBox 360 has ridden high for 18 months now as the top-end enthusiast system; problems be damned.
Now MS is cruising on easy-upgrades and yeah, PS3 still has the better hardware. No one is going to pretend an octacore system doesn't just destroy the 360's performance. Then again, if we're talking 2010, then we're talking about 38nm octacore. Intel has been showing them off already at trade shows and they scream.
So MS is doing what it's good at - sustaining technology upgrades - while developing the next generation systems for 2010. The whole competition will come down to who can get the best price to performance ratio: Intel or IBM.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
Effort to outsell? Yeah, that's the business world. Honestly though - let's look at how the game played out so far. Microsoft sucker-punched Sony and they took the bait hard. Let's review.
1. MS wanted to take out at least a 20% market share on their next generation box, the 360.
2. So they leveraged their PC hardware contacts and built the best system they could manufacture based on current technology.
3. Sony, never one to be outdone on a hardware platform, went and built something so advanced it couldn't even be reliably manufactured for the first two years. This meant they were selling $2000 hardware for $600 and being crapped on by consumers for price-gouging. Not an enviable position to be in.
The result? Nintendo pulled a ninja miracle by betting on the wii and XBox 360 has ridden high for 18 months now as the top-end enthusiast system; problems be damned.
Now MS is cruising on easy-upgrades and yeah, PS3 still has the better hardware. No one is going to pretend an octacore system doesn't just destroy the 360's performance. Then again, if we're talking 2010, then we're talking about 38nm octacore. Intel has been showing them off already at trade shows and they scream.
So MS is doing what it's good at - sustaining technology upgrades - while developing the next generation systems for 2010. The whole competition will come down to who can get the best price to performance ratio: Intel or IBM.
It should be fun to watch.