In a recent interview, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices division, named out problems with Sony's PSP that he sees as "cautionary tales" for all new handheld devices entering the market.
"The PSP is a reasonably successful product at the profit-and-loss level. But as a product concept, there are cautionary tales to learn from it," said Robbie Bach.
"While it is good at producing audio, it's not a good music player because it doesn't have local storage (except for flash memory slots). You can't keep your music there. It has a beautiful screen, but you can only get the video under the Universal Media Disc format. That format hasn't been successful."
"On a game level, it has done well. But even there, it is mostly PlayStation 2 ports. There isn't much original content."
Bach concluded by explaining how Microsoft intends for their own Zune to avoid PSP's pitfalls. 'When you do these devices, they can't be pretty good at a lot of things. They need to be great at what they do", he explained. "Zune is a great music player. We have local storage, a marketplace, the social network. We didn't do video right out of the gate because you want to do those things in a high-quality way."
"Same thing in the gaming space. It is technically possible to do games on there. But you aren't going to see a broad gaming effort from us until we sort that through and have it figured out. I don't think of Zune like the PSP. The PSP is a game player that also does video and music. We think of Zune as a broad-based entertainment device."
