Educated Guesswork

The unstated assumption made is that you are in a free market system (no monopolies at work), and that the systems are comparable in functionality, and enough time has passed to overcome inertia. Linux and particularly OpenOffice have only recently begun to catch up in the office productivity space, and they're operating at a severe market disadvantage due to proprietary data lock-in that Microsoft obtained abusing its monopoly position.

Even at that, given a few more years, it may start making a serious dent. In the building where I work, there are already more OpenOffice installs than Microsoft Office installs. If you want to have a Microsoft Office install on your own machine, you generally have to come up with the money for it yourself.

This is mostly irrelevant to Sony, however, which doesn't have the same market position or proprietary lock-in that Microsoft does -- and every single venture into proprietary media that they have made has failed. Memory sticks, pushed primarily for their Clie PDAs, are not commonly used, and Sony finally gave up on the PDA market completely. The MiniDisc sells only in Japan. ATRAC is DOA.

And in the case of the PSP, the signed binary system has already been broken:

http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=1570

Yeah, Sony really failed with those proprietary PlayStation and PS2 games... er, what was I saying?

The "cheap beats expensive" argument has some merit, as long as the items in question are interchangable as far as the user is concerned. Examples go beyond ATRAC versus MP3. Witness Beta versus VHS and token ring versus Ethernet. (The fact that Sony's mistakes in this arena serve as commonly cited cautionary tales despite a three-decade spread makes me embarassed on their behalf).

However, extrapolating this to cover console systems, where the individual capabilities and available games serve as a relatively powerful differentiator, is a bit of a stretch -- see Wes' examples. Ditto for Windows and OpenOffice.