President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios Phil Harrison has said that the platform holder did a “bad job” of communicating PS3’s capability to consumers in 2006 – but that the console represents a “fantastic achievement” for the firm.

Speaking to NewsWeek in a four-part interview, Harrison said:

“We did a very bad job between E3 2006 and the media event in October. [It's] something which in hindsight I wished we had done – but that's 20/20 vision. I wished we had released a movie showing the Xross Media Bar in action to the web after E3 2006. Not maybe showing every single feature, but just to give people something to chew on.

“Because it would have, I think, reassured an awful lot of people, like ‘Oh, there's a photo viewer in it,’ and things like that. We showed it in a very hard-to-reach room at E3. And even though it was there, and some people who bothered to queue up got the demo, I don't think we released anything moving as media. I think we released a few static screenshots. So that was an error.

“In hindsight we should have done something about that, and we should have said: ‘Here's the photo mode viewer. Here's the music player. Here's the Blu-Ray player. Here's the network functionality. Here's the Web browser.’ And I think we would have addressed head-on a lot of that. Now, we didn't.”

However, Harrison also lauded the achievement of PS3’s Japanese  manufacturers in the interview.

He added: “We are under no illusions as to the complexity of the challenge. I think what you've touched upon is actually the thing that we wrestle with internally. Our engineers in Japan are unrivaled in their ability. I have unbelievable respect for what they have pulled off from a hardware point of view, a software point view, an operating system point of view, how robust the machine is.

The fact that the Playstation 3 experience, which is exponentially more complicated than a PS2 or a PS1, works, does what it says, every time, efficiently, effectively – it's a fantastic achievement.”