It should come as no surprise to hear that Microsoft and Sony aren't best buds—they're competitors, after all—but what you may not know is how deep that animosity apparently runs.
IGN spoke with former VP of Windows Sales at Microsoft, Joachim Kempin, who explained why the Big M decided to get involved in the gaming market in the first place. "The main reason was to stop Sony. You see, Sony and Microsoft…they never had a very friendly relationship, okay? And this wasn’t because Microsoft didn’t want that," he said.
Despite the fact that Sony has Microsoft's operating system running on their computing hardware, the relationship between the two companies is rocky at best.
Sony was always very arm’s length with Microsoft. Yeah, they bought Windows for their PCs but when you really take a hard look at that, they were never Microsoft’s friend. And Microsoft in a way wanted them to be a friend because they knew they had a lot of things we could have co-operated on because they are, in a way, an entertainment company, you know? I mean, at least a portion of Sony is and they had some really good things going there, but as soon as they came out with a video console, Microsoft just looked at that and said 'well, we have to beat them, so let’s do our own.'
The "war" between console manufacturers has spilled into the gaming community at large, where many consumers align themselves with a particular brand of hardware. This has been going on ever since the early days of gaming and will likely continue into the foreseeable future.
With that said, do you align yourself with either Microsoft or Sony, or are you on both sides of the fence? Let us know in the comments below.
