>>281548
The rivalry was "justified" at the time in some sense. The PS3 was entirely developed by SCE back in Japan, and it was only thanks to the American division it wasn't missing essentially aspects like a fucking GPU. So the "concept" of having the American and Japanese divisions "compete" over where the company went did have some logic behind it.
That being said, the American divisions of Japanese companies have always been a troublesome bunch that lacked any amount of respect. We already "know" about the problems with Sega and Nintendo, but not as much attention has been given to Sony's American divisions. If you want to know where their mindset was, need look no further than Polygon Man. The damn PS1 wasn't even out, yet SCEA had already wasted millions (Of an already limited budget, because no one thought the PS1 would actually succeed) rebranding the system as the "PSX" (You ever wonder where that term came from?) and marketing it with their original mascot Polygon Man. As soon as Ken Kutaragi found out about this, he had a fit because the PS1 had been his personal project that he passionately and autistically spent years trying to get off the ground, into production, marketed, and finally released. After he found out, they immediatelty scrapped everything, and SCEA president Steve Race was fired not long after. Since then, there hadn't been much issue with SCEA until the disasterous PS3 launch and the company trying to recover from that, which lead to what I said in the previous paragraph.