I remember a time when Sony was king of quite a few hills, and king of no bigger a hill than the video game console market. The word PlayStation is synonymous with a gaming box attached to the TV. Sony is master of this market no more, however, and the worry now is that they may crash out of it altogether.

To put it bluntly, I'm not sure if Sony could successfully organise a piss up in a brewery these days, where the gaming market is concerned. The first signs of worry came in 2005 with the PlayStation Portable. The handheld console is a nice piece of kit, but it's over expensive, dogged by piracy and poor format support in the form of UMD movies and games.

From a business point of view, Sony couldn't even roll it out to the world without a bit of a fiasco - anyone in Europe may recall that the entire European allotment of the PSP was shipped to North America, where expected frenzied buying never emerged, leaving Europeans to wait a half a year for the handheld and American warehouses full of them.

It's the PlayStation 3 which is the biggest concern for the company, however. I dunno about you, but when a company stands up and says "Expect it to be expensive, ohh and we're delaying it again... and hiking the price again... and not including some of its best features as standard, like HDMI cables... ohh, now we are, but we have to raise the price again because of it..." Well, I'm not particularly confident in that company. I'm even less impressed when they stand out on stage and arrogantly proclaim to the world at large that "The next-gen doesn't begin until we say it does" when, to be frank, if we left it up to them mankind would probably never get out of bed in the morning.

The PlayStation 3 is setting itself up to be a massive failure, at the very least a large loss-leader for Sony. This lot think that it might bankrupt the company entirely. I doubt that a little, but the numbers are interesting to look at; certainly the "next-gen" isn't going to make Sony a particularly rich company in the short to medium run.

When Microsoft came to market with the Xbox we all laughed at the massive losses the company was incurring - and still is incurring with the 360 - to grow itself a market position. Now Sony too is going to make a massive loss on their console... funny how the "norm" can switch so quickly to such a polar opposite position. It would seem that the boys at Microsoft have a lot more long-term brains than anyone has given them credit for with their games business.