PS3 and Windows Vista: Twins Seperated at Birth
Category Management
Sony's PS3 and Microsoft's Vista both seem slated to share an unlikely parallel future of neither making good on their original sales forecasts. In the gaming console world, it's obvious that Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii are doing fabulous, and the PS3 isn't merely third place, but lagging, limply to place bronze.
Microsoft's Vista may not have the same caliber of competition as do the game consoles (though, Apple couldn't be looking any better, right now), but it's becoming clear that Vista is not going to the top of anyones sales chart. CRN has an insightful article about the cost of a Vista implementation. It's all about RAM.
RAM prices are on the rise, and the average workstation will need to be upgraded or replaced. Oddly enough, here's where the PS3 and Vista actually meet: they are both driving up demand for RAM. At the same time that RAM is becoming more expensive, analysts are estimating that half of all current workstations lack the resources to adequately support Windows Vista.
I think I can wait.
Sony's PS3 and Microsoft's Vista both seem slated to share an unlikely parallel future of neither making good on their original sales forecasts. In the gaming console world, it's obvious that Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii are doing fabulous, and the PS3 isn't merely third place, but lagging, limply to place bronze.
Microsoft's Vista may not have the same caliber of competition as do the game consoles (though, Apple couldn't be looking any better, right now), but it's becoming clear that Vista is not going to the top of anyones sales chart. CRN has an insightful article about the cost of a Vista implementation. It's all about RAM.
According to Dell's calculations, a PC running Vista with 1 Gbyte of RAM and an integrated graphics card, with Office applications loaded but not open and Internet Explorer open, needs 77 percent of a system's memory. But with 2 Gbytes of memory and a 256-Mbyte graphics card, the system running the same applications the same way requires 35 percent memory utilization.
RAM prices are on the rise, and the average workstation will need to be upgraded or replaced. Oddly enough, here's where the PS3 and Vista actually meet: they are both driving up demand for RAM. At the same time that RAM is becoming more expensive, analysts are estimating that half of all current workstations lack the resources to adequately support Windows Vista.
Softchoice, a Toronto-based industry consultant, issued a report earlier this month stating that it found the industry is not prepared to upgrade to a new operating environment.
"A close look at the average business PC reveals that roughly half are unable to support Microsoft's new Vista operating system," Softchoice concluded. Its report found a "poor state of hardware readiness among North American organizations."
"Fifty percent of the PCs included in [our study] are unable to meet Windows Vista's basic system requirements while a staggering 94 percent are unable to meet the 'Premium' Vista system requirements," the Softchoice report said. The study found 41 percent of PCs would require RAM upgrades to run Vista Basic, while 78 percent would need more memory to run Vista Premium.
"And since many organizations are maintaining PC life cycles of 48 to 60 months, it could take two years or more before hardware requirements cease to be a concern for organizations planning to adopt the new OS, unless Vista forces organizations to make major PC refreshes," the report concluded.
I think I can wait.
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Comments
According to Samsung, handset manufacturers have already designed new systems for 2007 that will require greater memory configurations and the memory supplier has already begun receiving their orders. Throw Sony's new PlayStation 3 into the mix—which carries 20-Gbyte and 60-Gbyte hard-drive capacities and which has several slots for memory cards to handle even the most intense, 3-D games—and memory vendors are looking at a busy next few months.
As whether or not the PS3 is making its sales numbers, I think a Google lookup is all that is required. It's true that they are not manufacturing enough units, but it's also true that Sony is taking a big hit for their disappointments, no matter how you measure it.
{ Link }
Money points out that the DS is also picking up some of the slack { Link } . Strange world.
Posted by Jack Dausman At 09:17:44 PM On 12/19/2006 | - Website - |
The PS TWO is still outselling the 360 while people wait for their PS3. The real cost of any console is your games. It was one of the decisions in going with the PS3 over the 360. Microsoft blew it on the compatibility front while Sony has provided compatibility with all our existing library. As the 110 million PS2 owners (and growing) upgrade they are not going to throw that investment away either.
Meanwhile Microsoft is releasing Halo 2 maps that are available to 360 owners ONLY - despite the fact the game was an Xbox original game that I paid for. Puts the lie to their claim about backward compatibility being something they are interested in. The same old screw your customers to force them to upgrade crap from Microsoft. No reason to do this other than forcing upgrades. Had enough of them. So have many many people - that's a better parallel story with the Xbox 360 and Vista than the PS3 one. They will just repeat the same anti-customer practices in this market as they do in the PC market. Just like the 360 adds marginal value over the xbox, so does Vista add marginal value over XP. Why bother spending money on either. That's the better story.
If you want a gaming and multimedia center the PS3 is hundreds of dollars *cheaper* than the 360 and has more features and functionality with better quality components. If you want just a gaming machine it is roughly the same price and you still get blu-ray playback for free in comparison to the 360. A Wii is definitely going to sell more units because of the price point - that's a given, just like ipod shuffles will outsell a $500 ipod. Although by the time you add on the price of Wii memory cards to be able to actually save your games the price differential is not as great as some might think. Especially as the kids start misplacing them and you need to replace them - as has happened with our PS2. In fact you may end up spending more money at the end of the day depending on how many kids you have. 4 kids and 4 memory cards = peace because 4 kids and 1 memory card = fights about why did you overwrite my game save etc...
At the end of the day it's the games/movies that are your real investment costs - they dwarf the original cost of any console. The decision should really be centered around what you want to do, what' the useful life from your investment. For us it was the combination of gaming and multimedia functionality for family photos, music, videos, dvd, blu-ray, cd, on one machine with one wire to to the tv that was appealing. Having everything in one place instead of scattered across various home computers etc.
P.S. Being able to drop a *standard* 160GB 2.5 drive into the PS3 to handle all those cds, photos and home movies is just the icing on the cake..along with free on-line access which is another $250 savings over the 360 given a 5 year life-cycle for consoles.
P.P.S. I'll be installing YellowDog Linux on my PS3 in the coming weeks to see what that looks like. Off the shelf hdd parts and open standards support vs proprietary hdd add-ons and closed systems. Which one do you want?
I don't understand your correlation between the PS3 sales being responsible for RAM prices but not the Xbox 360. Doesn't quite make sense to me given your first paragraph.
Posted by Stephen Hood At 03:06:57 AM On 12/18/2006 | - Website - |
What's become the preferred Linux image editor? Google's Picasa running under Wine. I think that trend is illuminating a trajectory leading into a client that is not 100% net or stand-alone. What's the next corporate client? A net-connected device that uses network services (SaaS) for the heavy lifting of hosted application, and local processing and storage for disconnected apps.
I am really impressed by IBM's Infinity efforts { Link } But, we aren't there yet. In the meantime--I think we'll continue to see Apple take market share before we see Linux installed as a corporate icon.
Of course, if WoW could be installed and run from a Live Linux CD then we would see Linux running in every household (and then it'll be OK to be used as a business machine).
Posted by Jack Dausman At 09:55:07 AM On 12/16/2006 | - Website - |
Bob Cringley had an interesting take on Vista being a guaranteed "success" for Microsoft ({ Link } but I'm not so sure. True, the mass consumer market won't be jumping to Linux on their own initiative, but corporations, which benefit from standardization and economies of scale, might, and within the next 2 years.
I could even see a cottage industry developing around giving retired corporate PCs a new life by loading them with Linux and distributing them to "low budget" customers such as charities and third world countries. Heck, corporations might even sign on with such outfits if they could re-warranty the refurbished hardware for another year or two.
Regardless of what the masses and the corporations do, more advanced users with perfectly good Pentium IIIs etc. will be putting Linux on those old machines pretty soon in large numbers. Paying the yearly anti-virus, etc. bills is getting old.
Posted by Kevin Pettitt At 02:44:57 AM On 12/16/2006 | - Website - |