After the third Saturday in a row of spending 3 hours on the phone working on my Dad's computer, I mentioned that I usually get paid quite a bit per hour to do this. He paused, clearly taken aback, and then he said, "I usually make a lot of money myself when I re-roof someone's house," (which he had done for me a few months earlier). I've never complained about providing tech support to friends and family since. People help me out in lots of ways, and sometimes I don't even notice. I don't need to keep score, I just figure it all evens out in the end.

There were 20 million GameCubes sold.

That number on its face sounds impressive, but it's still half the install base of the Wii, and 7 million less than the 360. Compare that to the fact that the PS2 sold over 5 times as many units as its competition.

A more pertinent number to this discussion is titles sold per console. I don't have those data on hand, but last I heard, the PS3 had a miserable stat in that category, as most early units were bought by videophiles as a cheap Blue-Ray DVD player, and weren't really being used as a game console.

By either metric, Sony doesn't dominate the market like they did with the PS2, and this has turned some of the design decisions made years ago into big liabilities.

There are a number of reasons to make a console hard to program for, but they all rely on a huge install base that the PS3 doesn't have. The article quotes a developer saying that if you are going to develop for multiple platforms, it is best to start with the PS3, because it will be easy to port to other systems than to port to the PS3. If there were 20 million PS3's in homes, this would ensure that the 360 and the Wii would be seeing lots of ports instead of original games. Another reason is that investment in programming knowledge and tools is very expensive, and once a studio has the expertise, they are likely to stick with the platform in order to maximize their investment. Sony was counting on a success similar to the PS2, were developers would have to program for the PS3 because that's where the users would be. Without it, the 'benefits' of a hard-to-program console become liabilities.

Phil Jackson had a famous conversation with Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, back in the Michael Jordan era. They were talking about what motivated people. Jerry said it was greed and fear. Phil said it was pride and love. Phil doesn't work for Jerry anymore. Both management styles have their proponents, so the fact that in this story, there were a couple managers who lean toward the fear and greed philosophy isn't exactly shocking, and it really doesn't make the case that those types of managers are the only ones who keep their jobs in tough economic times.