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Tenchu, Re: The same could be said right now of XBox vs. PS2, yet Sony still has a lot of mindshare and marketshare.

Several reasons why Sony won this generation console wars:

* They were first to market by a couple of years,
* Microsoft made their share of first-time mistakes,
* Sony had the world's best developers and plenty of exclusive titles,
* Sony had a lot of mind share from PS1,
* Sony's dev tools and middleware were mature by the time X-Box hit the market.

This time around, these things are different:

* Microsoft may in fact beat Sony to market,
* Microsoft has plenty of market learnings to help them do better,
* Microsoft will do better with having exclusive titles and more developers for this generation,
* Microsoft will have more mind share from XB1,
* Sony will not have the development or middleware advantage.

When all is said and done, the winner of the console wars will be the one who woos the developers and has the better games.

* This will be partly a technical battle
- Like I said in my last post, I think X-Box games are likely to look very good and possibly better than PS3 games in the beginning.

* This will be partly a licensing battle
- Microsoft is going up against the incumbent, but they have plenty of cash to take losses in the beginning, so I think they will price licensing lower and attract more developers
- Assuming MS has learned from their previous mistakes, maybe they will be successful in getting the Japanese developers, like Konami, Square-Enix, and Capcom. These will continue to be the winners going forward.

* This will be partly a battle of development feasibility
- Developers get turned off with systems that are hard to program, or that are expensive to program. Here is MS's biggest advantage.

Overall, I see MS as a much bigger player in the next generation of consoles.