The story isn't that sales have fallen 20%. It's that 80% of the demand still exists.

What we've really taught these companies is that they've traditionally undervalued their products, and if component prices return to "normal" there is no reason at all that retail prices need to track it. The supply side has all the power, and they know it now.

The new normal sucks.

Honestly if you didn't vote against this mess, then that is my answer too, bootstraps, guess you're looking for PS4s at garage sales now. Start thinking DDR4 ram for your next "upgrade". IDK, go get one of those nice recently deported immigrant jobs.

IDK how you honestly expect a company to operate in this economy and serve both ends of that K with luxury goods like gaming systems. It's shrinkflation or poor people editions. Maybe they can cut costs by removing the heat sinks but you can double it as a rice cooker.

Or maybe take aim at what's making the global economy so fucked up in the first place?

Kid, understanding the current economic conditions and being able to do fuckall about it are two entirely different things. Sony knows more about the global economic situation than you ever will because they sell a wide variety of things at every price point, globally. They fucking know dude, sales data from companies like Sony are how you objectively measure exactly how fucked up everything is.

You can't look at this economy, go gee, people are increasingly less able to afford nice things, then magic wand your nice things cheaper. If that were possible you wouldn't HAVE this problem. I mean what are you actually suggesting, shrinkflation the fuck out of consumer electronics? Bust out the old PS4 blueprints and slap PS6 on it so you can afford one? The other side of that K is still spending, OBVIOUSLY. What idiot wouldn't take their money?

I mean something along those lines very well may happen in the long run I just can't believe people are so flippantly asking for it. Like if you can't afford the cost of Oreos, I get begging for thinner cookies, it's still good, probably even better for us that way. What the fuck you think is going to happen to consumer electronics. Like it's Sony or Microsoft's fault for failing to address the increasing socioeconomic class divide by not launching "PS4 New" alongside PS6. Maybe start getting a little more serious about what's causing this fucking economy to be so fucked instead of begging to be served by it, FFS.

Found the idiot that got scammed into changing his battery fluids?

You're going to have to explain because hybrids are everywhere and nobody has that problem. There's nothing you do differently to maintain a Prius vs a Corolla for example. Over ten years it might go from 55mpg to 50 as the battery ages. Where do you get double from.

Why are you sharing all your thoughts on the internet if you have a problem with this.

Why right NOW is anyone going gee... maybe over-sharing every detail of my life with strangers online could be a problem. Some algorithm could scrape them up and use them against me or others.

You just fucking now come to this conclusion. ... seriously?

Fuck all the way off you sick weird freak.

The complaining is rote at this point in the stages of grieving: "that's was never considered 'intelligence' anyways!' The thing we now care (and always did) care about is whatever AI is currently NOT doing because we have souls, just not quite all those dummies at Church used to say!!"

How do you see the future of gaming? Interacting with AI agents with per-programmed personalities and responses to everything? Pick you dialog from a list of 4 choices still? It's not going to be like that any more.

You're full of hindsight bias.

It's like saying we CHOSE Linux and calling us dumb because we weren't doing hybrid Linux/FreeBSD the whole time when a good 25 year run ends, and not even ends, gets more expensive. Nothing you can say makes that 20+ year run a bad bet. It was the right decision then, it still was right up until Broadcom's uncertainty.

Why are you even talking about business continuity, nothing is shutting down, business is uninterrupted. Migrating from VMware NOW looks just like migrating from VMware ten years ago. A lot of time and effort to move to an inferior product (no hard feelings proxmox). The higher cost makes the inferior product more palatable, so we'll switch. That doesn't rewrite history and make running two OS, two switch vendors, two fabric vendors, two storage vendors, two server vendors, two virtualization vendors, two database vendors, two full suites of automation and monitoring tools make any sense. That's a lot of overhead you have to pay continuously that doesn't pay itself off unless one of the vendors is a bully. Now we know Broadcom is a bully, and that's the treatment they should get.

Vintage VMware from the early 2000s is still a better product than the alternatives today, but if you've only ever used Fisher-Price IT in the cloud rentals I guess you wouldn't know what to even do with a server.

Please explain what locked in to VMware means. They're just VMs. Exporting disk images and VM definitions is easy. What makes switching hard is all the other platforms are absolutely terrible.

There's nothing anybody wants to migrate to. We would have already done it already. Or other people would have, and there would be a comfortable split in the market. VMware had the lion's share of local virtualization because it was the only platform that didn't suck ass. That is the tragedy.

Go use one of the alternatives guys, now blow it out from your lab to thousands of VMs and many teams of people that just need to get their job done. They suck, don't lie. We export VMs back and forth from VMware to virtual box to AWS AMIs alllllll day, this is routine. Moving a vm or installing a new one and migrating applications to another OS is work, but it's not the barrier, and there's nothing particular to VMware preventing any of that. We just don't want to. AWS costs waaaaay too much for what we get out of our own hardware, so we have to decompose everything and look at it all sideways squinting to make the math make sense where before we'd just give it a little extra ram and not think twice. All the clouds suck like that, just running VMs on them is expensive. All the VMware alternatives for your own hardware ssssssuuuuuuuucks.

The guy says it's good, implied culling the herd, then explained that as the process where you kill your best bull. I'm not waiting around to hear the explanation of that crazy =)

How does that begin to make sense. If you kill the fittest animal because you could squeeze more money out of its steaks the fastest, you are left with a less fit herd. You repeat that and you have a herd of undesirable animals. Even your cattle analogy shows the bulls are not interchangeable, because you're filtering for fitness in a way that by definition leads to a worse group. The company you can squeeze the hardest fastest had the most viable product and reliable customers. Repeat that and it doesn't matter where the engineers go or which bulls fuck which cows, you're by definition filtering the best outcomes out, because that's the easiest most efficient juice to squeeze.

It's "good" for capitalism as in it's squeezing the most money the fastest, but if you always cut the healthiest trees, it's not good for the forest, which means it's not a benefit to a healthy market, which means that behavior is not good capitalism. Sorry there's just thousands of analogies that make this plainly obvious, including your own.

Don't pay for nice things. Great lesson.

Stupid and inflexible?

20 something years of ESX dominating, 20 years for anyone else to catch up, and the alternatives are still ass.

Stupid and inflexible because people preferred an affordable product that can migrate running processes seamlessly between servers, with native storage clustering and enterprise grade capabilities all _push button simple_ enough for one person to manage the whole operation out to an absolutely ridiculous scale, and was perfectly fine for over two fucking decades. I regret _none_ of that. Who wants to go back in time and double down hard on Xen virtualization, seriously? It's not even a funny joke, nobody wants that.

What do you have to show for that time, what virtualization platform would you put your name on and market if you could. Could you compete what you have today with ESX 2.0 and Virtual Center 1.0 from 2003 at an affordable price. You could not. 2003 VMware is literally a better product than every virtualization product available today, with the exception of hardware virtualization features that didn't exist yet, OK, so let's just say 2005 then. 20+ year old software has better functionality and usability than alternatives today, and frankly it's sad.