PS3 was supposed to be a lot of things by a lot of dates. I wouldn't hold my breath.
They will "break even or even make a profit" by August, maybe, if analyst predictions are right. That, of course, assumes they sell at current prices. If they do a price cut to the "barely break even" price, the competition can do the same amount of price dropping, and likely turn a profit even then. Meanwhile, if they still fail to move more systems, they stop getting as many games, which cuts into the profitability of the whole division. At that point even selling the system at break even doesn't do them a whole lot of good. And of course, even then, they have to try to make enough to make back the losses the division has made already.
This is not the same as the Gamecube and Wii launching at profitable prices. With the Gamecube, for example, Nintendo made money from every console sold from day one. They also made money licensing even the smaller number of games they got than the competition. Added to that they made a lot of money off their own games on the system (with most of the million sellers being their own). Thus, at every step they were money in, even with low sales.
Given that Sony's model is the same as Microsoft's, they need the black ink from licensing to be more than the red ink from hardware. I doubt very much if they will have enough systems on the market in the next year or two no matter what happens to make that kind of licensing money. It'd be like Gillette having three years selling razors at losses, where no one bought blades, and where more people bought razors from another company anyway.
Selling the system at a profit means no price cuts, and selling at break even or below means needing more licensing to counteract past and future losses. And dropping the price will almost certainly lead to reactive price cuts from MS and Nintendo, leading to more of those systems sold, and a lower likelihood of Sony coming back far enough to make big money from licensing from third parties.
See the bind they're in?
If you look at that article, it was written in April of 2008 so I'm pretty sure they already missed that deadline. Regardless, I'm really enjoying the system, particularly some of the downloadable games like Super Stardust HD and PixelJunk Eden that are only available through their online store. I wonder how much money they are making from the store, and if that will help them hit profitability soon.