A Weekend Full of Quality Time With PlayStation 3
Howard Stringer, you have a problem. Your company's new video game system just isn't that great. — Ever since Mr. Stringer took the helm last year at Sony, the struggling if still formidable electronics giant, the world has been hearing …
Context & Ripple Effects
Howard Stringer has led Sony for barely a year, having taken over amid the company's broader struggles, and the PlayStation 3 arrives as the first big test of his tenure. The ground was already shaky before launch day: Sony [[a:none|confirmed in September]] that the U.S. and Japan would get the console on schedule in November while Europeans were pushed back to March.
The review lands against that backdrop — Sony's October earnings had already offered only an ambiguous glimpse of its standing in the console wars, and the company had been talking up non-gaming uses for the hardware, including its August partnership with biologists running the folding@home project to harness idle PS3 processing power for disease research. A lukewarm verdict from the Times at launch weekend sharpens the question of whether the machine can sell on its own merits.
First-order effects
- Sony enters the critical holiday selling season in the U.S. and Japan with flagship reviews calling the system underwhelming, while the delayed European launch means the region contributes nothing until March.
- Howard Stringer personally owns the outcome: the review frames the console's shortcomings as a leadership problem, raising pressure on him after just over a year in the job.
Second-order effects
- With the games argument weakened, Sony's fallback case for the PS3's price rests on secondary uses — the folding@home distributed-computing partnership being the most visible — pushing the company to market the machine as more than a game console.
- Rival consoles face less resistance this holiday season: every negative review of the PS3 lowers the switching cost for buyers choosing between machines, and retailers' allocation decisions follow the reviews.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, console competition shifts from launch-day hardware specs toward software lineups and ecosystem pull, making early-review momentum a structural factor in multi-year platform economics.
- A stumble at launch by the incumbent leader would invite rivals and developers to treat the console market as genuinely contestable, reshaping licensing and exclusivity negotiations for years.
The trend: Console launches are being judged less on raw hardware and more on whether the software and services around the box justify its price — a standard Sony's PS3 is meeting poorly out of the gate.