[citation][nom]back_by_demand[/nom]Sony can suck my balls, never wanted to use them before and now I never will.Their TVs suck ass, their Blurays players are not the best, their gaming community is not even in the top 3, their proprietary music players and memory stick formats are just a load of crap and their pricing structure would make even Steve Jobs blush.The only thing Sony is any good at is forcing other manufacturers to up their game and produce a better product at a cheaper price.Way to go.[/citation]
Uh .. Sony is one of the top TV manufacturers in the world, likely the highest quality. Samsung provides the best quality for price but Sony has best overall quality.
Blueray, bash it all you want, but technologically it was better than HD-DVD and that format is now dead. With the growth of streaming I am not sure how many more physical formats are going to exist beyond blue-ray but there are always people that want higher quality ... which means larger data formats .. which means a need for optical storage. I doubt you would want to wait for a 50GB movie to stream to your TV, and those guys out there with the 60 inch TV's don't want to sacrifice quality so they want their blue-rays.
I have never had an issue with the playstation network when it comes to playing games online. The Xbox 360's social networking and game matchup features are better but that goes along with the old saying "you pay for what you get". Xbox costs $$ PS3 was free. The PS3's strengths have been in its ability to be a multimedia device (Blue-ray, streaming video, game/movie/tv purchases, standards complaince with streaming servers) and Xbox strengths have been online gaming and social networking. The newer black xbox closed that gap a bit since its not as loud when playing DVDs.
Comparing anyone in the MP3 market to Apple is a waste of time at this point, Sony and other manufacturers created MP3 products because in that market there is pressure that when there is a cool type of product, every company has to put one on the market, even if they know they have no change of pulling down the top dog (apple=ipod=top dog). I doubt sony ever really looked at the that market seriously in fact you can see them distancing themselves from music and into video technology over the last 10 years (TV / Blue-ray / high quality sound equipment / etc)
Sony hardly knows how to make anything cheaper than anyone else.