All about experiences

Darrell Etherington at Techcrunch.

The tech remains important, he stressed, but the idea was to create a platform that was all about experience. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s a tune Apple and Steve Jobs started playing years ago when they realized the spec race was a nonstarter in the mobile phone world.

When I asked what sort of company Sony was earlier, the PS4 event is making that clear.  They want to be a company like Apple.  Wanting do do that, and actually doing that has a very large gap between it.  I’m also failing to see why these new experiences warrant a very expensive console purchase.  There needs to be compelling reason for consumers to justify that purchase.

It will be very interesting to see where Microsoft, the king of pushing specs, goes with the new XBOX in response to this.

Update:  If you want to know the difference between a company that wants to be like Apple and Apple look at the way Sony are pushing the integration between the PS4 and the PS Vita.  No one cares about the Vita, and no one bought one, yet it’s becoming key to many of the PS4 “experiences”.  From The Verge’s live blog:

“To make remote play on the PS4 and Vita feel good… we’ve integrated Gaikai into the PS4 that effectively makes it a game server.” That sounds really cool, but what about mobile devices that people actually own?

Spot on.