I think the C-Level dictatorship know the relative strength & weaknesses of their company. Sony isn't good at online services and its infrastructure relative to other companies like Microsoft and Google. It took them a decade to allow users to actually change their user names on PSN because they were effectively using the username as a unique primary key and associating all game save data against locally and remotely.

How are they going to make a Google Stadia style service that requires custom hardware units in data centers around the world with the lowest possible latency to the end user? And how are they going to do it quickly?

I guarantee Microsoft has a competitor to stadia ready to go, they have the data centers, they have the development expertise and they've been pushing xbox apps onto every platform that will take them.

If Microsoft will give them a good long term rate on the custom azure instances that the xbox team will be using to host the games then that's probably a whole lot better than Sony trying to roll their own.

>>How are they going to make a Google Stadia style service that requires custom hardware units in data centers around the world with the lowest possible latency to the end user? And how are they going to do it quickly?

I mean....they already do, so in that sense they are ahead of Stadia. Playstation Now is a real service that exists and which you can use already, and which required custom hardware in datacentres around the world. Now we can argue whether it's as good as Stadia promises to be, but that's purely theoretical at this point - one product is an actual commercial thing you can get, the other one exists in beta stages.