Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
It's hard to imagine a product rollout that has been botched as badly as that of the PS3. However, in spite of Sony's worst efforts and the consequential embarrassment it so richly deserves the company will still end up with a winner.
The PS3 was terribly late to market, badly beaten
in the PR stakes by Nintendo's Wii, hampered by production problems and
was embarrassingly overpriced. In fact, for probably the first time in
history a major product had its price slashed (in Japan) before it was
even released.
To make matters worse, Sony insulted customers outside the US and Japan
by not only delaying supply by months but making the PS3 even more
expensive in Europe and Australia than it is in the US and Japan.
As a result, Sony itself has been forced to suffer the embarrassment of
nearly empty queues at its most recent midnight launches. Here in
Australia, at AUD$1000 plus extras for games and additional
peripherals, should Sony have expected anything else? Frankly, no.
However, the nextgen consoles market is a long distance race and the PS3 is a console with staying power.
As my colleague Alex Zaharov-Reutt has pointed out, the PS3 is the most
powerful consumer computing device you can buy. In addition, the next
series of games to come out for the PS3 in 2007 and 2008, will start to
take advantage of the power of the PS3 architecture, with the sort of
stunning graphics that will set new benchmarks for gaming.
While critics are bemoaning the fact that there is a lack of exclusive
PS3 games as yet, you can bet your bottom dollar that with nine cores
of supercomputing power that there will eventually be games for PS3
that Xbox 360 just won't have the horsepower to run, let alone the Wii.
In the meantime, there are between 1700 and 2000 PS2 and a handful of
PS3 games to keep PS3 owners occupied.
While many hardcore gamers are not impressed by non-game entertainment
features, there appears to be little doubt the Blu-ray is currently
winning the high definition video war. Even Microsoft is starting to
make noises to that effect.
The PS3 is an expensive games console but it is currently the equal
cheapest Blu-ray player on the market. If gaming history is anything to
go by, the first round of PS3 price cuts will be on their way in the
not too distant future. When the PS3 cuts come, they will also
represent Blu-ray player price cuts. While wide screen HDTV units are
not the standard in average households just yet, the market is just
starting to bubble, making the timing perfect for families to seek a
cost effective Blu-ray player to go with their new high definition
plasma set.
Of course, all this is academic if Sony doesn't get its PS3 games
producing pipeline into gear. More than anything else, what 100 million
plus loyal Sony Playstation fans want to see first and foremost are
some great new games.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
