Rick’s Rants and Raves

I’m going to write it now so that later I can say “see, I told you so” to an invisible friend… The Playstation 3 and Blu-Ray DVD are doomed to economic failure.

Why? I present as evidence the PSP & UMD, the Mini-Disk, and of course Betamax.

The Sony Betamax debacle has been debated many many times. I won’t repeat it here.

The Mini-Disk is one of many of Sony’s attempts at producing a proprietary media format whose benefits are purely technical (normal folks can’t tell the difference). Even today, when the format should be well into post maturity, a blank mini-disk is $8-10 for 1GB of storage. Compared to a DVD with 4.7GB of storage and retailing for $0.50 each, that’s just ridiculous. The mini-disk never took off because Sony controlled it soup-to-nuts, and kept the prices higher than competing technologies.

The PSP and UMD will soon be in the technological ash-heap of history. Evidently, Target is no longer selling UMD movies after virtually no one cared to buy them. Again, over priced, proprietary format. And the PSP is an over-priced console, compared to the other offerings, especially from Nintendo. Yeah, yeah, the PSP is technically better, more powerful, etc, than anything Nintendo has put out, but as a $100 price premium for a hand-held gaming system, its hard to justify the extra cash.

Finally the PS3 and Blu-Ray. There are literally hundreds of surveys that indicate that the PS3 is going to be too expensive, and $100 over the Xbox360’s premium version. Why the price difference? New Blu-Ray technology (oh yeah and other stuff). So, Sony is trying to stuff a piece of brand new (i.e. nearly 0 demand) technology into a game system, probably to drive “synergies”. Gamers will get hooked into blu-ray; movie watchers may get a PS3 as an inexpensive (in comparison) blu-ray player. Unfortunately, the price is too high for the PS3, the technical differences don’t really matter (see VHS vs. BetaMax, Mini-Disk vs. world), and the blu-ray format may as well be another UMD–just about as proprietary with Sony being the biggest corporate chearleader.

So here is my prediction: by the end of 2007, the PS3 will be in third place in next-generation console marketshare, and sales of Blu-ray movies will be less than half of HD-DVD.

There, I said it.