If this announcement is not a joke, then Sony’s move would turn off the most accessible machine on which one can develop/test software on the powerpc architectures. For fans, or conscientious programmers who wish to test the portability of their code, this means that ppc is becoming ephemeral. It is not worth $severalK to buy an IBM box, and simulators may or may not be good enough. With linux distributions also dropping powerpc, there will be less and less software to run on the thing in whatever form. IBM must be thrilled. Intel might feel some schadenfreude, but then again the ia64 was never a hobbyist platform.

Sony, you suck.