Anilrgowda

In a recent newspaper interview, Sony's Head Kaz Hirai spoke about the PS3 and its supply and demand issues.

Here's the meat of the interview:

* To compensate for the limited supply, Kaz says that Sony is chartering flights to bring systems to North America faster -- normally, items of PS3 size/weight are sent via boat. Production is ramping up also, but still... chartering flights is way more expensive than boats. Thanks, we guess?

* Shipments would like to be weekly to keep up with demand, but that's up to consumers. As for grabbing one off of a retail shelf casually, that's also up to the demand of consumers and Kaz has no idea when the surplus will kick in.

* Kaz says that Sony does not favor one retailer over another, so if your pre-order falls through due to unit allocation, it's the store's fault... not Sony's.

* No price cut in North America for the 20GB model. Oh well, who wants that one anyway?

* The bottleneck in production came from the blue laser diodes, but that's been fixed. Even so, says Kaz, "you do have a ramp-up period. You suddenly can't go from zero one day to 100,000 units the next day."

* Support for the PS2 will continue for some time -- unlike other console companies who drop an old console overnight.

* Kaz assures us that PS2 and PSOne titles that have compatibility issues will be ironed out with firmware updates. That's the beauty with the PS3!

Full interview: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06337/742542-42.stm