Sony has to contend with Sega and Microsoft, an alliance that may show its true colors with the recent release of the Windows CE toolkit 2.0, and, lest we forget, Nintendo, with its own unique perspective on the future of gaming.

Don't read any further if you choose to view gaming in the following term:

"The graphics had me crapping in my pants"

This isn't about the visceral experience of joystick jockeying. I'd rather look at how Sony , Sega , and Nintendo will stack up as businesses, and where the heck Microsoft fits into all of this. I wouldn't have even mentioned Microsoft if I hadn't been amused by the attention given to the so-called "X-Box". If you read the articles about X-Box on Next Generation's site, or at C/NET and a number of other nooks and crannies of the Web, you'll probably discern that it is no more or less than a PC. In fact, whether it exists as a real product or not, the X-Box sounds like a misguided attempt by Microsoft to dress up the PC as a competitor to game consoles. Why people choose to compare the PC to consoles is beyond me. First of all, just look at the price, then look at the way they work, and finally, if you are still not convinced, look at the display. Chalk and cheese , if you ask me. As for trying to specify an Nvidia controller, and sell a game-enhanced PC through Gateway and Dell , well, I have one thing to say, when were those two PC makers ever game savvy? Gateway and Dell, like all PC vendors, have been opportunists, riding the wave of enthusiasm for performance game machines so that they could sell high-end PCs. Nothing more; nothing less. Anyhow, high-end home PCs are sold on the basis of some extravagant multimedia technology, and very rarely as pure gaming machines.

There is also the oft-repeated statement that game consoles are sold at a loss, or near break-even in order to get game software sales, the razor and the razor blade analogy, but I think that argument is less applicable these days, particularly in light of Sony's very ambitious hardware plans for PlayStation2. By all accounts, and according to Sony's management, PlayStation2 will be sold at a profit and will get to the consumer at a competitive console price point. I don't doubt that for one very simple reason, Sony's investment in manufacturing for PlayStation2 alone warrants a hardware profit. Of course, consumer electronics vendors such as Sony have been delivering sophisticated electronics products at consumer acceptable price points for many, many years. It's only the computer industry that seems to have a problem with pricing to the expectations of the consumer. You could blame that on the stranglehold of Intel and Microsoft, but computers are primarily business machines, and that means that as long as businesses need them to survive, they will fetch a premium over the luxury of consumer electronics products. So, probably the most worrying aspect of the PlayStation2 to the computer industry isn't its performance, but its pricing.