Microsoft Exec Thinks Sony Blew It With PSP

While PSP has been a reasonably successful product by any measure, don't count Robbie Bach, President of Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Group, as a fan of Sony's handheld.

"The PSP is a reasonably successful product at the profit-and-loss level. But as a product concept, there are cautionary tales to learn from it," he recently told VentureBeat.

"While it is good at producing audio, it’s not a good music player because it doesn’t have local storage (except for flash memory slots). You can’t keep your music there. It has a beautiful screen, but you can only get the video under the Universal Media Disc format. That format hasn’t been successful."

He wasn't done with his criticism quite yet.

"On a game level, it has done well. But even there, it is mostly PlayStation 2 ports. There isn’t much original content. When you do these devices, they can’t be pretty good at a lot of things. They need to be great at what they do," he added.

Not surprisingly, he prefers Microsoft's Zune.

"The PSP is a game player that also does video and music. We think of Zune as a broad-based entertainment device," boasted Bach.