The Playstation Death Spiral

A year ago at this time I was telling a friend that Sony and it's Playstation 3 would absolutely win the next round of the console war, barring a major disaster or screw-up by Sony.

As of today Sony has officially screwed-up, and it is a spectacular disaster.

The news: The PS3 will not launch in Europe until Spring 2007. Sony also announced that there will be only 400K units for the North American launch and 100K units for the Japanese launch.

400,000 units means your chances of scoring a unit this year in the U.S. is only slightly better than the odds of winning the lottery. And Japan? There probably won't be one system per game store there. Disaster may be too mild a word for this.