Sony consoles will continue to rule over Microsoft: report

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 18 April 2007 18:12

Your IT - Entertainment

According to Philipson, the figures show just how hard it is to shift people's perceptions.

"We find time and again, in virtually all of our preferred vendor analysis, that initial market share translates into mind share, but that any subsequent changes in market share takes a long time to be reflected in mind share. Reputations in this industry are very important," he said.

"I was a little surprised and I expected that Microsoft would have come up more because of the massive one year advantage that it had over Sony when it released Xbox 360. However, there is an argument that going forward Sony will have the advantage with PS3 over the Xbox 360 because Microsoft came to the market early with an inferior product and may even have hurt itself."

Philipson believes the strong brand loyalty to Sony consoles will result in PS3 emulating the success of PS2 and PS1, which each sold more than 100 million units worldwide.

"I would be confident in saying that," he said. "The PS3 is technically a more advanced machine than the Xbox 360. The data indicates that despite being an year late to market, Sony has maintained its reputation as the better games machine. In the long term, when we look back at this in five years time, the one year lead that Microsoft had with Xbox 360 will be seen as not being at all significant."

And what of the Nintendo Wii?

Philipson said it has lifted Nintendo's stocks dramatically in the games space but not to the detriment of either Sony or Microsoft.

"It's not the same sort of machine and I would put it in a different category to the PlayStation and the Xbox," said Philipson. "A lot of people will have a Wii and either PlayStation or an Xbox. Because it's cheaper and it has that kinetic capability it provides a totally different gaming experience, so it's more complementary than competitive. However, not many consumers will own both a PS3 and an Xbox 360 because they're direct competitors."