Nintendo, well I think we all agree that they should have worked harder with Sony to find a way to bring the 32bit CD add on to the SNES. They made a major mistake and a bad enemy on what they did and how they did it. You just dont do that at a major, press filled, conference. At least you dont do it and expect not to end up in a mjaor corprate and legal war.
Sony has made some really stupid mistakes in the past on games and in media in general. In this case I'm gonna say it was a little of both that really bit them hard. The attempt (yet again by Sony) to hearled in a new media format. UMD. Between buying the patents, setting up a complete distribution system, R&D so they could replace their near dead MiniDisc players with it, and R&D for using it on PSP's (and the R&D was in the tens of millions for PSP alone if I remember correctly), plus to top it all off they just had to DRM and limit user access to the point that nobody was willing to use it. It's just a major loss of cash and it was just bad thinking since they make their own memory sticks and they could have just chose to go that route. Drop MiniDisc, save on PSP battery use, and put the money saved on the UMD fab plant into covering the cost of larger mem sticks.Â
MS well, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say a much older blunder in the video game market. Back in the early 80's MS spent a great deal of cash to create the "MSX Standard" system design. This was during the "great game crash of '83". While the console market was in it's death throws. The home computer market was starting to really boom all over the world in on fashion or another. MS thought they had found a way to design a standard computer that any company could make their own version of and have a stable cross platform system that would sell because it was cheap and meant for games. They spent millions on the project, and keep in mind that this was both in early 80's dollars and when MS wasnt the billion dollar giant it is today.  They were still trying to climb up the ladder with many other OS platforms so that loss of cash really hurt them in the long run because the had to close a number of projects down. Out of a fully funded program with top of the line engineers, devlopers, and the deal made all over the world to deliver the parts needed to make this design, only one company ever made signed on. They brought out a basic model and a delux model. They just didnt sell well. In fact only the basic model was sold in the U.S. and Europe. And that was for about one year. It sold in asia a bit longer, but died a very quiet deat. The names of the systems were Spectravideo's SV-318 and SV-328.  It was a long shot, but a great concept. If it had worked, then MS might very well have been the leader in the console wars of the late 80's and early 90's and Nintendo would have been stuck on the bottom with Sega, NEC and Atari. Instead, it was a colossal waste of time, money and effort. Still, MS never forgot about it. They brought the whole concept back in a software form that is the basis of modern PC games, as well as the building blocks of their second attempt at the game market. That's why they called it Direct "X". ^_^
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