Didn’t Phil from Microsoft state publicly about preserving old games? Is this a reaction to that?
Yes, Phil said companies should make an effort to preserve games.
But I assume he mostly said it as PR bullshit to brag about having done more effort than the other platform holders with BC games, maybe to cover the lack of new exclusives compared to the other platform holders with back catalog from previous generations.
Notice that now that they'll start to get a fair amount of new exclusives they stopped to add games from previous consoles.
I assume that more than an a reaction to that quote, it comes from one of the Sony goals as corporate level, which is to push and expand their direct to consumer digital services and stores (which in gaming means PSN and PS+) and part of it they aim to increase their content and IP, in addition to increase their markets (meaning cloud gaming supported in more countries and a download only option for countries without cloud gaming, plus -in the future- to sell PSN games on mobile and PC).
And an easy and cheap way to add a lot of game content, that in the future would be easy to play it natively on PC and mobile, is with games from old platforms. And well, excluding PS4 all PS consoles and portables also featured BC and with digital games many of them with crossbuy, these things weren't invented by MS. So it wouldn't be rare to see Sony doing it again.