Harrison admits 'mistakes' to Newsweek

[dawg33]

Studio boss outlines past PS3 PR errors, but talks up finished product.
President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios Phil Harrison has said that the platform holder did a “bad job” of communicating PS3’s capability to consumers in 2006 – but that the console represents a “fantastic achievement” for the firm.

Speaking to NewsWeek in a four-part interview, Harrison said:

“We did a very bad job between E3 2006 and the media event in October. [It's] something which in hindsight I wished we had done – but that's 20/20 vision. I wished we had released a movie showing the Xross Media Bar in action to the web after E3 2006. Not maybe showing every single feature, but just to give people something to chew on.

“Because it would have, I think, reassured an awful lot of people, like ‘Oh, there's a photo viewer in it,’ and things like that. We showed it in a very hard-to-reach room at E3. And even though it was there, and some people who bothered to queue up got the demo, I don't think we released anything moving as media. I think we released a few static screenshots. So that was an error.

“In hindsight we should have done something about that, and we should have said: ‘Here's the photo mode viewer. Here's the music player. Here's the Blu-Ray player. Here's the network functionality. Here's the Web browser.’ And I think we would have addressed head-on a lot of that. Now, we didn't.”

However, Harrison also lauded the achievement of PS3’s Japanese manufacturers in the interview.

He added: “We are under no illusions as to the complexity of the challenge. I think what you've touched upon is actually the thing that we wrestle with internally. Our engineers in Japan are unrivaled in their ability. I have unbelievable respect for what they have pulled off from a hardware point of view, a software point view, an operating system point of view, how robust the machine is.

The fact that the Playstation 3 experience, which is exponentially more complicated than a PS2 or a PS1, works, does what it says, every time, efficiently, effectively – it's a fantastic achievement.”

source:http://www.mcvuk.com/news/25933/Harr...S3-to-Newsweek

just got this..artilce about Phil's Interview

[Breed]

Didn't they not show it off properly coz it was only a very limited version? They just basically showed how it worked.

[Yixian]

Despite obvious, and repeated mistakes on Sony's part in manufacturing, advertising and developing for the PS3, as far as hardware is concerned, there's no denying that for such a complex and new-tech device, the general concensus is: the PS3 works extremely well.

As for manufacturing, advertising and developing software and games for the PS3 - it's so far either been slow or mishandled, but all signs point to all that coming back on track very quickly.

Luckily things like the early success of Blu-Ray and must-haves like Resistance have tided the console over until now, but things have got to pick up fast now.

eg. the XMB - the XMB is infinitely more basic than the XBox 360 dashboard, and yet the PS3 is infinitely more versatlie and has a megatojn more potential than the 360 - so the firmware/software side of it needs to really take advantage of the PS3 now.

[RickyDeHaas]

wow thats a nice read!
and Phill is a very intrested man in the whole playstation 3 project!
Phill Rocks!

[Nstriker20]

I can forgive and forget but i don't know about the rest of you guys.

[SimmoUK]

Yeah this is just an article on an old interview from Phil Harrison it must be slow for them, notice how it picks out the bad bits again, it's almost like the title is so they can justify the bad press they've been giving out which most of has been rubbish...

[Breed]

I don't think anyone can deny that they really need to get their PR sorted. I think they're just about realising that people arn't fooled as easily as they used to be and that you can't just show off a CGI (I'm not saying MSFT or Ninty are innocent either) and get away with it. People are more tech savvy these days and company's must buck their ideas up.

At least, by this interview, Sony are learning.

[AndyD]

The PR is always Sony's weak spot, they dont reveal much, they dont put out a lot of demos or movies and they are in general perfectionists (they wont release any info until its done). They could definitely benefit from giving us some tidbits, if nothing else to use the feedback to gauge their products/developments.

[Yixian]

I can forgive and forget but i don't know about the rest of you guys.

Yeah I can. Sure, the store should have been much fuller in the first place, sure there should be more social features in place etc.

But that's fine, I forgive them, so long as they get to work on fixing that fast, and importantly, let us know they are working on it and give us a rough time frame, because otherwise these flaws are so often passed off as permanent by the media.