Third gaming crash imminent

Chris Kohler over at Wired's Game|Life thinks another game industry crash "shakeout" is imminent. He refutes the common wisdom that the great crash of '83 was a crash after all (he calls it a shakeout) and that it was caused by a dearth of quality games. He also directs our attention to the second crash shakeout of 1994 to 1995. Seeing the same golden rainbow investors saw in 1983, companies like Panasonic, Pioneer, and Atari entered the fray and promptly failed. Now as we enter the next generation of gaming, we find ourselves on the brink of yet another shakeout as products like the Tapwave Zodiac, Nokia's N-Gage, and surely Tiger Telematic's Gizmondo all crash and burn, the hopes of their investors trampled. It all comes down to knowing what you're doing. Nintendo, Sony, and now Microsoft all appear to "know what they're doing" and "shakeouts shake out those who do not."