What's simply bizarre is that Sony has retained this horrible, horrible, dpad, in the sweet spot on all their controllers, for 15 years. Even worse, Sony made exactly the same idiotic control mistakes with the PSP (which is a new system with a different control scheme, so much less affected by compatibility concerns) -- an awful dpad, in the "main position", and an awkwardly-placed analog controller seemingly tossed in at the last moment as an afterthought.
I think the reason for the lack of imagination or innovation in Sony's controllers probably has a lot to do with video games being a major after thought to the company. They started out making TVs and VCRs and crap like that, and that's what drives their thinking even today. They really shouldn't be in the video gaming industry at all, and the reason they are is because of their work with Nintendo on that SNES CD addon which never came about, and this was repackaged and released as the PS1 which was successful because of good timing, luck, and stupidity of Nintendo and other companies in that era. So they really shouldn't be in the industry at all, and their dominance of being the market leader has been a position they never really deserved because its all based on ripping off Nintendo's ideas and being lucky.
But I would beat that the Sony executives don't actually even play video games, not even their own. They are more concerned about Blu-ray and other consumer electronics and the PS3 was just a means to an end, with that end being Blu-ray winning over HD-DVD. Well, they've achieved that end (unfortunately) but the cost was them dropping from 1st place to 3rd place in the console wars.
But I don't think they really even care... Sony treats its fans as cows for them to milk off of, which is also true of Nintendo somewhat, but at least Nintendo is completely game oriented and actually invests in innovative control methods and game concepts. Every Nintendo system has seen a different controller setup than the last. When the Wii 2 comes out you can be sure that it will feature some new controller method, but as for the PS4 its probably going to be the same boring old Dualshock/SIXAXIS piece of crap that they've stuck with since they ripped the idea off of the SNES.
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It's only stupid looking back. If you go back and check out what the situation was at the time you would have done the same thing as Nintendo. Sony would have had total freedom over games released on the CD-ROM add-on and made money from games released for it (even Nintendo's). Sony has did not have a good record as a developer as most of the games they had published had been pretty bad. The deal with Philips would have been better for them.