Variety Magazine hosts an interview with Sony CEO Howard Stringer in which it claims he has confirmed that the Playstation 3 console has slipped and will not be out until holiday 2006.
We have been shouting for a while now that the signs are there that Sony will not make its spring 2006 launch window and even though their spokespeople have swung back and forth on the issue, their unease said more than their statements.
The actual claim on the Variety Magazine story states Sony's new PlayStation 3 was widely expected to be introduced this spring, but will be delayed as the company fine-tunes the chips that are crucial to the success of the console's Blu-ray function. The sentence which suggests a release date for PS3 is rather confusing as it doesn't seem to directly quote Mr. Stringer until the very end: Sony will roll out the PS3 by year end, in time for the holidays. If PS3 "delivers what everyone thinks it will, the game is up," Stringer boasts.
Since the interview was not for a gaming publication, we have to admit that the news may well be challenged but the statement seems rather emphatic and probably the product of some off-the-record comments by Mr. Stringer. We will have to wait for Sony's official mouth to open before we can claim the delay to be final.
The story does not mention if the holiday 2006 date is for Japan, U.S. or Europe although we would suspect Japan and possibly the U.S. will get the console first.
One other interesting piece of information presented by Mr. Stringer has to do with the role of Blu-Ray and of HD-DVD in this next-gen console war as he suggests that Microsoft's rush to get XBox 360 out may have been a strategy to corner Sony into releasing an incomplete Blu-Ray drive. According to Mr. Stringer then, Sony wanted to avoid being stampeded by Microsoft into rushed decisions which will remain ...there forever.
Microsoft has chosen to support the HD-DVD format while Sony will champion Blu-Ray technology which is widely accepted to be the major reason behind any PS3 launch delay. Sony's proprietary approach to electronics is heading for a head-on collision with Microsoft's model of a common market place.