Actually its not that bad.

One, the article itself says that Sony stands to make money on the software it sells.

Secondly, the costs that go into the development of platforms, hardware or software, tend to pay over time, for more than one product line, because everything from software to hardware tends to be reusable, to one extent or the other. For example, the investment that M$ put into DOS paid back in DOS sales, Windows 3.1 sales, Windows 95 sales and even XP sales. Only Vista was written from the scratch (and what a poor job they did  )

Actually, Windows XP and Vista are both based on the NT kernel. XP did not use DOS, and Vista is just an upgrade to the NT kernel.

Ah I indeed was off on XP being based on DOS. It indeed was based on NT core (but then you see, NT development resulted in reusing its core for Windows 2000, Windows ME and Windows XP).

That was my idea about reuse.

Btw Vista was based on Windows Server 2003, which was based on Windows Server 2000, which was based on Windows NT, but was completely redesigned according to the "Trustworthy Computing" inititative. Wasn't it?