Sony's been dealing with a lot of negative buzz over the last few months, but it's important to remember that they're still the market leader and have incredible brand name recognition with the PlayStation. Earlier this week, the company finally had someone report something positive about their upcoming PlayStation 3, as analysts at the Yankee Group predicted the console to win the battle for market share by 2011.

In a new interview with GameSpot, Sony Computer Entertainment America president Kaz Hirai discussed the Yankee Group's forecast and how Sony's launch plans have been going so far, among other things.

"It's generally a very positive report," said Hirai of the Yankee Group forecast, "but you can tell they've done a lot of their homework because there are some things that we need to work on. We've had those ups and downs as far as manufacturing is concerned on the console, for example, and that's being properly addressed."

A number of analysts and industry watchers have predicted that the PS3's high price combined with the Xbox 360's head start and competition from Nintendo's affordable Wii would seriously erode Sony's market share. In fact, DFC Intelligence president David Cole had written about Sony possibly going from "first to worst." Despite the negativity, Hirai is quite bullish about Sony's chances in the next-gen race.

"My plan basically is to make sure that we keep at least as much market share as we have had with the PS1 and the PS2. We don't plan on ceding any of the market share to our competitors, especially after the cycle has gone deep," he said. "...when we look back, I'd like to think that our market share will be as good--if not better--than what we've accomplished with the PS2 in the same kind of time frame since launch."

Although manufacturing for the PS3 has not yet begun, Hirai noted that everything is basically "on track" in terms of launch plans. "I just came back from Las Vegas where we we're still actually having our internal sales and merchandisers gather for basically four or five days of intense meetings. Everything from retail strategy to talking about the interactives, and how you can reboot it if your power goes out, so everything from nuts to bolts all the way up to the retail strategy. So we're internally really getting geared up to go to market with this beautiful console in three months' time, and at this point in time all signs are good to go," he said.

The Xbox 360 launch was notorious for its severe shortages. While Hirai expects Sony to handle the PS3 launch a bit better, he did admit that shortages are simply impossible to avoid.

"I think that we've always talked about shipping 2 million units worldwide within the calendar year. Since we're going with three territories, we haven't really come up with an allocation just yet. But even if you do the simple math you're talking about less than 700,000 units per territory, per major territory, between launch and the end of the year. So even if there was some fluctuation--you give Japan more, you give the US more, what have you--you're going to end up with some shortages," Hirai explained. "... I think it's going to be very much of a challenge to be able to meet every single unit demand that's out there in the market. That's just a logistical impossibility. Unless we suddenly say, 'Well we want to wait until June of next year to launch because we want to stockpile product,' I don't think that's the approach we want to take."

Check out the full interview at the link above.