[aspir]

A company supporting their involved, early adopting developer base? What?

In all seriousness, its a huge marketing backfire for Sony to act in this manner, and a huge plus for Microsoft in it's respective choice. I understand the "magic black box" theory of product development as it referes to the 99% of the population that doesn't mod, but that 1% is a vital asset who's influence far exceeds their numbers.

These two populations are inherently different, and should be treated as such. It would be a bad marketing move in this day and age to force typical users to hack, and its an equally bad move to force hacker users to follow suit.

[Groxx]

Sony has a history of huge backfiring actions. This is just another point to add to the trend-line.

[dexen]

Perhaps somebody at Sony HQ is reasoning along the lines, ``it's more important to be talked/written about, than it to be only positive news'' -- all this bickering about PS3 keys and Other OS feature created quite a bit of publicity anyway.