Kaz Hirai Dooms 360 To Short Life

Sony’s PlayStation 3 has a 10-year plan. We’ve heard about the plan, we’ve seen Sony’s current execution and we’re starting to see some of the titles making their way to the PS3 for 2009. The Xbox 360? Kaz, Sony Computer Entertainment’s head man, made his thoughts clear when speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine.

kaz“Last time I checked, they’ve never had a console that’s been on the market for more than four or five years and we’ve committed to a ten year life cycle, so you do the math…,” he says. He goes on to state that the Xbox 360 won’t have a larger install base by the end of their 10-year plan has been completed, “unless things go really bad.”

Of course, nobody says Microsoft’s 10-year plan isn’t to push out yet another console. Is that wise? We don’t really know, but you can’t count them out on it. Maybe they’ll only have half the install base but two consoles in the market within the next ten years, nobody really knows.

The one major hole we can see in his comments revolve around their claims that the Microsoft doesn’t have any history of a console being on the market for very long. If I recall, Sony managed to squeek one by on Nintendo with the original PlayStation, which changed everything for the next ten years. Sony didn’t have a 5-year track record when they started taking Nintendo down, why does Microsoft need to have an extensive resume as well?

As for Wii?

“It’s difficult to talk about Nintendo because we don’t look at their console as being competitors. They’re a different world and we operate in our world — that’s kind of the way I look at things…” (kotaku)

Say what you want about Microsoft vs. Sony, but it sure sounds like Sony doesn’t want to acknowlege Nintendo’s success because it casts a dark shadow on their own product. Nintendo and Sony have been battling for years, that’s just the way it is and that’s how the industry sees it. When NPD releases numbers, when journalists write articles about consoles and when the war is finished one thing remains constant: all three consoles are included in the equation.

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An expert has given testimony to the US House of Representatives Subcomittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade during its commencement on hearings on the “unauthorized intrusion” on Sony’s PlayStation Network and Qrocity service, stating Sony knew that their security software was dated and lacked any sort of firewall against hacking.

Cybersecurity expert Dr. Gene Spafford’s testimony stated that security experts discovered discussions on forums that talked about how the PSN’s security was lacking. The threads revealed that the network was using old versions of the Apache Web server software, which “was unpatched and had no firewall installed.”

Worse, two to three months before the attack, the vulnerability was reported “in an open forum monitored by Sony employees,” but the company took no action to rectify the situation. If the testimony is accurate, Sony could be slapped with a serious criminal negligence charge.

The Sony intrusion alone compromised 100 million accounts both on the PSN and its Qriocity service, according to Spafford. He also cited the total cost of the breach to Sony, credit card companies, and other outfits, at $21 billion. Thieves in credit-card theft forums actually complained that the PSN breach was so great that it was depressing the price of such information by a “factor of five or 10” on the black market.

Spafford didn’t reserve his accusations for Sony, either. He stated that law enforcement is ill-equipped to handle cyberterrorism and cyberthieft. Additionally, most companies are not equipped with enough security measures because “investing in security measures affects the bottom line. They don’t understand the risks involved by not investing in security. … So when they are hit, they pass that cost along to their customers, and to the rest of society.” In other words, a classic case of being penny wise and pound foolish.

Spafford’s proposed solution to future security is to limit the amount of data kept by companies such as Sony and to “age the data” so it expires after a certain time.

C-Span posted the video of the testimony here.

(Thanks, GameSpot.)