Now that the PlayStation 3 has celebrated its first birthday and Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) CEO Jack Tretton also has a year under his belt in the new position, the SCEA chief sat down with MSNBC to discuss the PS3's early struggles and the PlayStation business overall.

Tretton believes that the PS3 would be in a better position today if Sony had simply been able to ship more units. As you may recall, however, a blue laser diode shortage at the time put a damper on the launch (and led to the European launch being postponed).

"I don't think there's any question that there were missteps, but I don't think anybody is being honest with you if they say that the first year of any platform goes perfectly according to plan. I think the biggest miss for us was the launch, in that we had easily a million consumers in North America alone that wanted to get their hands on a PlayStation 3 ... and we had roughly 200,000 units to take advantage of that demand. ... I think that that was probably the biggest disappointment for the first year," Tretton admitted.

He added, "The reason why we don't end up on window ledges, where other people might not have the perspective, is we've been through this many, many times, and we're the only company that's gone out and had 10-year product lifecycles and sold over 100 million units — and we haven't done it once, we've done it twice. ... What we're trying to do here is ... refocus the game industry towards high-definition gaming, a real state-of-the-art, future-proof machine for the next decade. ... I think if you have that long-term perspective, while I fully admit we'd like to have sold more units, it's hardly cause for panic."

Interestingly, regarding his competitor Microsoft, Tretton said that they launched the Xbox 360 a year ahead of the traditional console cycle not so much to get a head start but because "they'd taken the Xbox as far as it could go, and so if they wanted to remain in the business, they had to go back to the drawing board."

He also seemed to criticize Microsoft's Core SKU, which the company had said all along is available to give consumers choice, and the lack of free online gameplay. "Another thing that I think really strikes a chord with PS3 consumers is that we're giving them everything they need, in the box, day one. Our competition talked about the fact that they want to offer consumers a choice, but then they make it clearly apparent that if you really want to have the full gaming experience, you need to go out and invest a lot more money than you originally thought you were," Tretton said.

[Note: GameDaily BIZ also has an interview with Jack Tretton in the pipeline and we're hoping to bring that to you this week. Stay tuned.]