Howard Stringer Dismisses Activision As Whiners
- Scribbled on July 8th, 2009 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Editorial Content, Interviews, Sony PlayStation 3, WTF
Sony CEO Howard Stringer is casually dismissing Activision’s demands for a PlayStation 3 price cut, basically calling Activision CEO Bobby Kotick a whiner by telling Reuters:
“He likes to make a lot of noise. He’s putting pressure on me and I’m putting pressure on him. That’s the nature of business.” When asked about the logic of not cutting prices, Howard said, “I (would) lose money on every PlayStation I make — how’s that for logic.”
Of course, Stringer doesn’t seem to want to discuss the fact that there’s a loss on every PS3 sold now. Then again, this is the man who managed to steal David Letterman from NBC and still lose late night to the cosmically unfunny Jay Leno, and who was brought to Sony in 2001 and helped turn the #1 console into the #3, and lost the war with iTunes badly (”We can no longer say that we’re right and our customers are wrong. We can’t build only what we want to build.” No, really, Howard?) Then again, Stringer noted back in 2007, “Nintendo Wii has been a successful enterprise, and a very good business model, compared with ours … because it’s cheaper.” He predicted a strong lineup of games that year would spur PS3 sales – they didn’t.
Stringer’s attitude here is befuddling. Not only is he mocking and alienating the largest third party software publisher – and Activision isn’t the only one asking for a price cut – but when Sony does release the PS3 Slim and drops the price, he’s going to make it look like Activision and others bullied Sony into dropping the price.
(Thanks, Engadget.)
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