Several US news sources (including this one) have picked up on a fresh industry report written by Michael Pachter and Edward Woo for Wedbush Morgan securities. Over an impressive 188 pages, the prophetic twosome suggest that Microsoft will dominate the market until 2007 at which point Sony will take over via PS3. Microsoft will then slip into second place, except in Japan, where Wii will take the runner-up position. There's also something about how Sony will use PS3's Blu-Ray drive to sneakily build consumer interest in the technology - you know, like they did with the cheap DVD drive in PS2.
I have yet to read this report, partly because it doesn't seem to be on the company's website and partly because it's 188 pages long. That's longer than The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm or The Invisible Man. 188 pages of - what I guess is - supposition, hypothesis and conjecture. And let's face it, the conclusions are hardly ground-busting. This one, quoted on Next-gen.biz, is reasonably interesting, though...
"We believe that the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are far more similar than their predecessors were, and believe that the economics of game development will serve as a disincentive to third party publishers to offer exclusive content for either console. As a result, we think that Nintendo's Wii, backed by the company's deep library of high quality content, may surprise many by gaining a greater share of the market than did its predecessor, the GameCube."
This theory has been gaining credence over the last few months as it becomes clear that PS3 and Xbox 360 are a lot closer, specs-wise, than their predecessors.
But really, do these reports really mean anything? The technology sector is subject to a constant flow of them, mostly covering how much money will be made by certain sectors in, say, five or ten years time. Journalists love to quote the 'findings' - it is nice to be able to draw statistics from the unknowable future. It is convenient. Comforting even. But should investors - surely the legitimate targets of the industrial report industry - set any store by these predictions? Surely not. Anything beyond the broadest projections is mere folly.
By the way, this isn't the first time we've encountered Michael Pachter. Last year, I blogged about another one of his reports, which covered a downturn in console sales. "You need people to buy more stuff. This is a bad downturn," he informed Reuters sagely.
