Agreeing with all my siblings' comments, computers took cues from a lot of places and evolved to be general-purpose. Something similar happened on the GPU side, and at some point, the best parts of bespoke graphics hardware got generalized–plus 3D upended the whole space. By the PS3 era, there were multiple GPU vendors and multiple generations of APIs, so everything had settled down and standardized. The era of gaining a competitive advantage through clever hardware was over, and Sony, a hardware company, was still fighting the last war.
That has been and I’d say still is a huge problem for them. They are not a software company at all and it hurts many thing.
PlayStation is the one exception. But they learned the wrong lesson from the PS2 (exotic hardware is great! No one minds!) and had to get a beating during the PS3 era for the division to get back on track.
