Sony’s “not so smart” handling of the PS3 helped Xbox 360 succeed- Former Microsoft games boss

Former head of Microsoft’s Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division Robbie Bach says the Xbox 360 succeeded partly because of how Sony mishandled the PS3.

“Some of the success of Xbox was due to the fact that Sony did some really not so smart things,” he said at Northwest Entrepreneur Network (thanks, GeekWire). “

They mismanaged their 70 percent market share. It’s a long conversation.

“The transition to PlayStation 3 was really, really bad. And really hard. They mismanaged their partners, they mismanaged their cost structure. They made their next platform so complicated that developers couldn’t develop for it.”

He also talked about the Xbox 360’s amazing third party support right from the get-go. “When you’re doing a startup, you need friends,” he said. “It’s just the way life works. It turned out we were able to convince retailers and publishers like Activision, Electronic Arts and others, that it was a good thing for Microsoft to be successful, because if we were not successful, the only game in town was Sony.

“Being dependent on somebody else was bad for them, and so they supported us disproportionately to what they should have, mathematically.”