I know media loves to cover all contests as a horserace, whether it be presidential politics or business rivalry, but this is less a story of What Sony Did Wrong than What The Competitor Did Stunningly, Amazingly, Breathtakingly Right. Same with Sony's entry into the portable MP3 player market -- don't know the name off the top of my head but they've had one for a decade, right? -- which is now The iPod Market because Apple has designed and marketed one of the most iconic products of my generation.

Its not that the Sony entrant -- whatever it was -- was flawed. Its just that Apple just totally ran away with the game.

[And when my mother, who is 56 and had a stroke three years ago such that until recently she could barely move without assistance, mentions that the Wii is her favorite Christmas gift ever, you KNOW Nintendo did something right.]

I love outsourcing disaster stories. Business strategy 101: never outsource the functions that give you competitive advantage. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html

But you can outsource in a strategic way, right? Like McDonalds, and KFC, with their seasonings - no one vendor knows all the ingredients or their quantities. Didn't Apple take a similar path with the iPod and then the iPhone? They rolled one critical aspect of the product themselves - the software - but the competitive advantage of the hardware was strategically outsourced.

the competitive advantage of the apple hardware lies in the design, not the actual manufacturing of it.

Sure, but if it was as simple as ordering parts from vendors couldn't anyone reconstruct either product on the hardware side?

They can and do, for the most part. iPhone knockoffs are a dime a dozen, for the most part, although Apple has design patents to keep them from looking too close to they original.

One line summary/spoiler: "Technical supremacy divorced from sound strategic vision is no virtue, it can even end up in disaster."

Wii innovated and became better in an area that happened to matter more: player interaction with the console. I don't think it was obvious in foresight that this was so important.

Exactly. That last line was the most glaring with the whole article because it was the Nintendo GUI that gave them their current standing. Their "vision" emerged from their greatest weakness - the inability to compete with the biggest boys in playing the same game. So instead they changed the rules by innovating. They must have known they were aiming for a different slice of the market but without appreciating how big it could be.

Perhaps not to us, however Nintendo bet the farm on this vision. The Wii is weaker graphically and in online connectivity than its competitors. It also had the disadvantage of following the (relatively) disappointing Gamecube. Had the interface failed Nintendo could have ended up like Sega: left to publish games for other consoles.

Does anyone have any concrete info on what similarities the Cell and Xbox 360 CPU share, besides the fact that they're both by IBM?

I was under the impression that the 360 CPU is based on the old PowerPC designs that IBM already had in-house, and is a far more traditional CPU (albeit with 3 cores) than the Cell.

The Wii/GameCube one definitely is based on the PowerPC designs - I hadn't heard that about the 360 chip. Lo and behold, you're right: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-fpfxbox/?...

The PPE core is a completely new design (it isn't even similar to the G5, let alone derived from it). The WSJ article is correct; the PPE was originally part of Cell and it was later improved (with additional instructions) and used in the Xbox 360 processor. Even though they both share the PPE, the two chips have radically different architectures because of the SPEs (or lack thereof).

I found it interesting to watch these design processes from inside IBM; I'll have to check out the book.

The Cell is based upon a PPC G5 core with 7-8 SPU's or in other words cores which are specially designed vector processors. All of the cores run at the same clock speed (3.2 ghz)

AFAIK, it's a 3 core PPC G5. The XBox team was using the g5 powermacs to do development.

Great read, but amongst all the drama they both lost!

Now off to play some FUN Mario Kart!