Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer offered several humorous jabs at Bill Gates’ salesmanship methods recently to The Wall Street Journal. Sir Howard pointed specifically at Gates successfully deflecting software delays at Microsoft while criticizing Sony for its delay of the PS3 (and getting away with it).
Stringer said to the Journal, “Look, the skill of Bill Gates is he’s so brilliant at his detail that when he slips in the salesmanship, most of us think: oh my God, he must be right… He talked on the one hand, and I loved it, he talked about Vista delayed as if the delay was normal, and then he started mocking me for delaying PS3."
Stringer then took the opportunity to join in the ranks to laud the positive aspects of the PS3 machine and the oft-lamented high price point. "It’s got more bells and whistles than a 747. That Cell processor is extraordinarily powerful and you have nine hours of high definition on the Blu-ray disks alone. The reason it’s expensive, instead of concentrating on just the games player, which would have been done in the past, PlayStation 3 is designed to go somewhere else, where it’s the center of the living room."
Cynics in the gaming community would also point out that the PS3 is as prohibitively expensive for some gamers as 747, as well.
It is apparent that Sony is doing its best to redirect the negative image of the PS3 from an overpriced game console into one of a feature packed next gen machine that is superior to the rest of the competition. The message is beginning to reach the ears of consumers, but whether the message has enough time to saturate the public in order to generate sales won,t be answered until the launch of the PS3 this November.
