While there hasn't been much news of the development, and every youtube video about the topic seems to be nothing more than a "rickroll", I decided to stop by yet again, to speculate.
With the current state of the market in a recession, could that impact the future of technology?
Might Sony need to cut back for financial reasons? Or even if they wanted to spend, might it be difficult to find the technology in mass development?
The Sad truth is that the reccession impacts everyone!
With that being said, the gaming industry seems to still be doing well relative to the rest of the economy. And what could help the cause is that Japan, home to Nintendo and of course Sony, although still impacted, has invested a lot of money in nanotechnology, in fact, more than any other country has. So I actually remain somewhat optomistic about the future of gaming. I think that innovation is what we need if we are going to help turn things around. Some believe the internet boom and innovation is what kept money flowing into the market in the late 90s when markets may have otherwized declined. That's both positive and negative. It's Negative because if not for such booms, the markets may not have been bid up so high in the exhuberant times leading to an unnatural boom, and now the unnatural "bust" we are experiencing.
It may not have been the internet that brought the economy down, but it was the failure of new ideas and continuous innovation that made them come back to reality, which was much lower than anyone imagined, as the dot com innovation took the market much higher than people realize. Of course it wasn't until 2008 that the market peaked, but the market actually has been in a fall since 2000 if you measure it in gold. Gold is a better indicator since you could double the amount of money overnight and everything would cost twice as much even if the economic conditions declined. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan effectively did so by lowering inerest rates, and irresponsible spending casued inflation to result in a rise in prices. So if stocks have been in a decline in TRUE value since 2000, why?
In some measures the market was overvalued in the late 90s, even the mid 90s. Warren Buffett stepped out of the market in 96 because he felt stocks were overvalued. But he didn't realize how big the mania of the tech boom was going to be.
You see, the internet tech boom of the 90s was much more responsible for the decline than anyone realizes. First you have several investors putting a whole bunch of money into internet companies when stocks are overpriced. Then, you have every day people becomming CEOs and business owners of, internet companies and taking advantage of all this money pumping in as people look for the next Yahoo and ebay (the next yahoo was Google, the next Ebay was Amazon). So now you have all these CEOs out of nowhere getting paid in stock options and becomming rich over night along with everyone owning stocks. Of course then you have the wide open lending practices. Fill out a form and you'll get a loan, put up nothing down now...
Everyone thought with the market in a "new economy" that they could simply sell their stocks and pay everything off... and besides home prices rise so if we can't make payment we can always sell on the spot.
The problem is, several companies manufactured earnings, and rather than innovate there was people that were crooks that tinkered with the numbers. That was not the very end, but eventually the money could no longer continue to flow faster and faster nor could the new innovations. So suddenly people put their money into real estate, as the money transfered over for awhile into real estate. People had been accustomed to overpaying for houses, because that's what they had always done, and it continued to go up and up.
The problem was there wasn't enough income to feed this bubble for very long.
With the new CEO getting the dot com stock options and high increasing income, that made sense. But the average income plummeted, and people had to move out or find another way to make money Now people wanted in on this market, even though they couldn't afford it.
You have every day people adding to the hype, you have people lying about what they have in assets to get bigger loans and bigger houses, they all figure they all can sell at higher prices, but since EVERYONE is buying now, and not as many people will buy later, it is difficult.
So without the influx of dot com money, you could simply not expect people to spend like they did before. Yet they still did. Some of them sold early and dealt with the realization that they couldn't afford as much, but others tok out home equity loans and continued to buy, using their home as a credit card to pay off their other credit cards which were used to pay off credit cards. But this could not last forever even as people lied about their income to borrow more to buy another house and use it as a credit card to pay off their additional debts.
But even worse, as the money transfered over into the oil businesses, and gold mines due to all this excess money from low interest rates, soon businesses had to deal with high gas prices and expenses for food and other things that had inflated in value due to the low interest rates that was a reaction to the sharp sell offs. Meanwhile the consumer had to deal with those things as well, and it wasn't long before they couldn't afford as much. So now the retailers had to hike up the prices and make job cuts, and people lost income and as the income declined, their ability to purchased declined with inflation, but now they had to deal with less income in dollars as well. Now is where the businesses started to crumble, and even those at the top (gold and oil) were not going to be able to continue to profit the same way. People were not going to make the same mistakes they did. So everyone spent less, businesses went under, job cuts were made, lower income results in lower income, and soon, all of the people looking to buy a new home are terrified of buying, plus they don't have enough income to support the current prices anyways.
This is a very serious negative trend, so how can I be optomistic?
Well, there are two ways out of this mess. One is to let nature run it's course, something that should have been done after the peak in 2000, but if done now, the consequences could be disastrous. If we do nothing, we may have a depression. But if we try to pump all this excess money into the system things may be good for awhile, but it may actually make things even worse IF that extra money and credit doesn't lead to more actual production.
The real solution is innovation... we are spending with the HOPE that serious innvation that revolutionizes everything can make what is an inflated level that people can't pay for seem reasonable. An example would be if all of a sudden an invention came along that reduced our dependency on oil and gas (and solar isn't going to cut it). Something like cold fusion, zero point energy, or Teslas free energy ideas.
While a playstation 4 might not be the cure to zero point energy or cold fusion, it is at least a start. See all the stimulous plans in the world won't bail out an economy if people aren't willing to spend, and companies aren't going to produce if there is no demand. BUT new innovative products that people just HAVE to have WILL get people spending. It will get investors back in the markets, and if confidence can be restored jobs will start again. If people can actually form companies that produce value that people are willing to payfor, the exchange of value will help all of us. It isn't that there isn't enough to go around because there's enough natural resources for everyone to live like millionaires. It's that there's not enough innovative ways to continously do new things that people are going to continuously want to exchange their wealth for, in a way that everyone can continue to bennefit.
Out of neccessity there's certain things that people need. Food, water. If the economy consisted only of this, everyone would have to be in farming or the business of water and exchage food for water. But then there would be people in other parts of the world who wouldn't survive because the climate isn't right to grow food. But, the economy also uses minerals, which people use to build tractors which tractor businesses create in an innovative way. Because of this innovation, now the farmers can grow more food, and the people with a lot of food would certainly be willing to give a LOT of food away in order to have this tractor, and as a result, the company making this device would be willing to also give a lot of food to those that can supply the material. Then those that supply the material would have to innovate to find an easy way to get it out of the ground. So someone else might innovate and make a new creation. It's this innovation that allows us all to live great lives.
Some people think communism is great in theory, but observe that it never works and it probably won't work. Why? Because when people are forced into certain jobs into such a strict system that only functions a certain way, there's no room or reward for innovation. When people aren't creatively going on their own to look for their own solution.
So state run capitalism (facism) or comunism with a dictator, won't work becase there's no room for innovation. It's a utopian view of the world, but the world is not good enough for a utopia. It does not run effeciently enough. In a utopian society more people would have to die, population would have to be controlled, and innovation could never occur.
This idea that God is done creating is wrong, that the universe is done and is already "complete" is wrong. It continues to grow, chemicals, continue to combine, planets continue to form, the universe continues to expand, and we must innovate to keep up with the changing world. Soon the population will continue to grow, unless something changes, and in order to pay for all of the resources we continue to need, we must find a way to get more out of what we already have, and find a way to harness the infinitely available energy of sun, wind, earth, but also innovate and find ways to combine chemicals and harness the quantom power of all the atoms and electrons.
Whether it's cold fusion or simply a game that requires nano technology, the playstation 4 could just be the new technology we need to get the momentum going again.
Whats to say that the next play station doesn't provide such a powerful engine that people are able to use it to simulate and understand cold fusion or the quantom energy field. What's to say that by accident developers try to create a system that has a device that better monitors our movement and in doing so they make it so powerful that it can even monitor the atoms around us?
Never underestimate the power of innovation, especially when it comes to a new playstation 4 console.
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