For those of you who are old enough to remember the monumental three-way product/platform wars between a variety of different players, as well as the various face-offs between heated contenders, you can often slot the threesters into that ol’ Good-Bad-Ugly trifecta.
Perhaps not this time, however.
Apple’s [AAPL] Snow Leopard OS release on August 28, 2009 has an opponent in the game console arena from none other than Microsoft [MSFT], in the form of a decent amount of price-slashing, which improves market/player share and reduces inventory nicely. This allows Microsoft to offset the later availability of their own OS replacement coming, Windows 7. And the same-day alert of price cutting on August 28, 2009 steals a lot of the thunder from Sony’s [SNE] own announcement earlier this month about the upcoming PlayStation 3 Slim, which is now announced for a September 1, 2009 North American release. Although the Xbox 360 Elite remains fundamentally the same, it is still a strong contender against the PS3 Slim, so the pricing and software libraries will ultimately decide this latest round in console supremacy.
Admittedly, this is a crooked kind of comparison, but there is a lot of convergence going on, primarily to set the stage for future products and services in the pipelines. It also opens up the possibility of niche players potentially making a play for a greater presence in the realms of gaming, general computing, and mobile computing and entertainment.
