Sony Computer Entertainment Chairman and Group Chief Executive Officer Kazuo Hirai sat down with Official PlayStation magazine for a chat.  The entire interview is not yet available and will be appearing in the February issue, but a preview proves to be quite enlightening.

Despite criticism for their refusal to change in order to compete with Nintendo and Microsoft, Sony executives have always stood by their tactics, confident it will all pay off at the end.  Hirai is no different as he pushes forward with this strategy.

"This is not meant in terms of numbers, or who's got the biggest install base, or who's selling most in any particular week or month, but I'd like to think that we continue official leadership in this industry," Hirai said.

"It's difficult to talk about Nintendo, because we don't look at their console as being a competitor," he explained.  "They're a different world, and we operate in our world - that's the kind of way I look at things."

With a laugh, Hirai then added, "And with the Xbox - again, I can't come up with one word to fit. You need a word that describes something that lacks longevity."

He points out Sony's unyielding committment to their Ten Year Plan, which benefits consumers in the long run.  The PlayStation console should be seen as a reliable product that will not "fall by the wayside in fire years."  This is, of course, another stab at Microsoft's Xbox and Xbox 360, which industry experts consider to be Sony's closest rival.

"And unless things go really bad, there's no way that at the end of a life cycle our competition is going have a higher install base."

As for complaints concerning the PlayStation 3's hardware, Hirai stated that his company is not out to make developers' jobs easier, but to ensure quality.  He doesn't deny that the PS3 is more complicated to work with.

"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?"

So the SCE boss basically dismisses the notion that the PS3's complexity could be a liability.  Instead, he considers it an asset and cites God of War as a perfect example of setting the curve using all that Sony's hardware has to show.

He concludes, "So it's a kind of - I wouldn't say a double-edged sword - but it's hard to program for, and a lot of people see the negatives of it, but if you flip that around, it means the hardware has a lot more to offer."

And what of PlayStation Home, the social networking tool that will eventually sell consoles better than games?  Hirai has high hopes that Home will mature into a force of its own, luring consumers to the PlayStation 3 before they notice the platform's game lineup.

"We want to expand the demographics from just a videogaming audience to something that's a little bit more massive."