Charlie Demerjian has written an interesting pair of articles over on The Inquirer.
They're a review of the relative paths of Sony and Microsoft vis-a-vis their consoles and the expected life cycle.
Before you Pooh Pooh them as "Just Another Sony Hata", may I point out that Charlie has a phenomenal number of industry insider contacts. He really knows the IT biz. He is sometimes wrong, but not often. There is a joke that HP and Intel staff were more often than not finding out about various insider projects and changes from Charlie rather than from any official channel.