3/24/2007

How companies spin like politicians

With the launch of the utterly overpriced Playstation 3, I was amazed to hear Sony's "spin" on the launch of the console.

Unlike the XBox 360 and the Nintendo Wii, there are no shortages of Playstation 3 at launch. Sony claim that this is because "They have seen the mistakes made by their rivals and they have ensured that demand has been more than met".

The real story is, of course, rather different. Whereas Nintendo Wii's are still unavailable unless pre-ordered due top the continued staggering demand for them, Sony simply do not have enough buyers out there who want to pay £425 for a console when they could get something similar for £250 from Xbox or for £180 form Nintendo.

Far from "meeting demand", quite simply "demand has not met supply". You could credit Sony for this or ask, why aren't the people out there buying Playstation 3 ?

3 comments:

Sir Edward Heath said...

Hate to break it to you - but the Play Station Three console has broken United Kingdom sales records with more than 165,000 machines sold in the first two days of release. It has also been revealed by the BBC that more than a million consoles were shipped across Europe for launch day last week with around 600,000 being sold in total.

The compares with Nintendo who sold around 105,000 Wii consoles and Microsoft who sold just 71,000 Xbox machines during its United Kingdom launch weekend.

Perhaps if Microsoft and Nintendo had got their acts together they would now hold this UK sales record.

Anonymous said...

Um, no, actually, this is a false comparison. Nintendo and XBox sold out their full allocation of machines on launch day many months in advance.Som three months after the Nintendo Wii was launched, you still have to order the machine in advance as they simply fly off the shelves, such is the demand.

Similarly, the Xbox 360 was unavailable for months after its launch.

Microsoft and Nintendo could both easily have broken the PS3 totals, but they were more concered at getting their product to market as soon as possible.

it is worth noting that in Japan, the pS3's main market, the wii is still selling every console before they get to shelves, whereas the PS3 is lagging badly.

There will always be an initial demand, but that tails off quickly usually. In the case of the wii, that is not the case.

Nich Starling said...

The fact the Sony were trying to encourage pre-orders on the assumption the PS3 would sell out it 200,000 stocks shows how they have mis-calculated.

Sony were expecting PS3's to sell their full 200,000 instantly, instead every shops still has them for sale.

Pages