During May the specification for the next generation Sony Playstation was revealed. The machine is not due in shops until Spring 2000. However, the announcement was important enough that it provoked the Economist Newspaper into an article on its importance to the world economy. So why all the fuss?

The new Playstation is 128 bit technology and runs at twice the speed of the fastest Pentium III processor from Intel, it is claimed. So it will run some pretty cool games. In fact games developers have been frothing at the mouth with excitement. The games market now represents a significant part of the world entertainment ecomony but that wasn't why the economist was so excited.

The real reason was the announcement that the new Playstation will come with Internet browser capability! What does this mean?

In practical terms, it probably means a plug-in cartridge or CD-ROM with a Browser and JVM. This in itself is no great revolution. The excitement is in the economic statistics.

The current generation of Playstation and its Nintendo and Sega competitors have much higher penetration into ordinary households than PCs. In North America, 50% of households own a games console. In Europe, the figure is lower but is still more than twice the number of households with PCs. The trends are important too. The console sales are increasing and are gaining ground again against PCs which were for a while the prefered games platform of the savvy teenagers around the planet.

Sony have a sound reputation for developing ubiquitious technology and leading the market. The speculation runs that a new Playstation marketed at a different audience as an Internet "set-top box" will gain ground on Sega and Nintendo and expand the market. The prediction therefore is that more than 50% of North American households will be accessing the net from a Sony within 3 or 4 years.

Does this sound preposterous to you?

Think back 5 years. Java didn't exist. How many of you have WWW access? How many of you had an e-mail address? How many of your friends, family? Things change quickly when barriers to entry are removed.

Sony have the potential to remove the barrier to entry for the non-technical masses. They have shown the ability to design and deliver ubiquitious consumer technology and more recently they have shown a willingness to produce good, intuitive, easy-use software by hiring Alan Cooper's design company.

Just imagine a Cooper Design browser running in a consumer oriented Sony box, which sells for under 400 US Dollars.

Sony also have a high street dealer network which spans the globe. They have the manufacturing and marketing ability to sell 500 million units of the new generation machine.

How long before your children are asking you, "Dad, do you remember something called Microsoft Explorer? Aparently it was software for the internet?"