On Wed, 12 Apr 2000, Bijan Parsia wrote:

> 
> Why? I'm afraid I don't see the revolution. If you mean breaking Sony's
> stranglehold on development tools for the Playstation (keeping in mind
> that I know nothing about such matters), then I'd be surprised if Sony
> would grant a licence that entailed them losing money or even diminishing
> profits. So, no revolution of that sort, alas.
> 

Sony doesn't have the only Playstation development tools. Metrowerks sold
CodeWarrior for Playstation for a long time. Sony's business model on the
Playstation was that games could not carry the Playstation logo w/o Sony
taking a cut, so Sony lost money on hardware, but made its profits on
(other people's) games.

Playstation II is a different animal than Playstation. The machine uses
the Emotion Engine chip which is supposed to be a truly great graphics
chip. The machine also comes with a DVD drive and a FireWire (IEEE1394)
port (Sony calls it iLink - FireWire is the Apple name).  Besides being a
great game machine, you can surf the Web, send andd receive e-mail, and if
you have apps hosted you can run remote web hosted apps. The majority of
American houses do not own computers, and the Playstation II may change
that.

The question is, I do not know what Sony's business model for the PSII is.
I'm not going to develop for it if I have to tithe Sony, and Sony makes
its money off software sales. I don't think many app developers would go
for that. However, if Sony sold it as a game machine that you could also
get a decent word processor, spreadsheet, simple database, quicken etc for
that would really improve sales.

I expect PSII will have a revolutionary impact. Computers is still a small
industry compared to home entertainment, and as the 2 converge, I'd put my
money on Sony rather than Microsoft (Sorry, the VCR crashed. We have to
reinstall the OS before we can see how the movie ended).

I expect the installed base of PSII machines to be several times the size
of the installed base of Windows machines in several years, and if Squeak
is available fast on PSII it could turn into the development language of
choice for a lot of people.

-Russell Swan