Xbox Originator: "Stupid, Stupid Xbox!!"

Freshly Exhumed writes "You can't begrudge Nat Brown for claiming some pride in the birth of Microsoft's game console: 'I was a founder of the original xBox project at Microsoft and gave it its name. Almost 14 years after the painful, pointless, and idiotic internal cage-match to get it started and funded, the hard selling of a compelling and lucrative living-room product to Bill (and then Steve as he began to take over), a product that consumers would want and love and demand, I am actually still thrilled to see how far it has come...' But in his recent ILIKE.CODE blog post he is driven to lament that '...as usual, Microsoft has jumped its own shark and is out stomping through the weeds planning and talking about far-flung future strategies in interactive television and original programming partnerships with big dying media companies when their core product, their home town is on fire, their soldiers, their developers, are tired and deserting, and their supply-lines are broken.' Nat goes on to detail a list of Microsoft's past and present strategic Xbox blunders, while tossing some barbs towards Nintendo's and Sony's game console strategies."

Re:Daily Microsoft bitch-fest

[AlphaWolf_HK]

The ones about UEFI annoy me the most. Too many people, even on slashdot of all places, think UEFI is just a graphical addon to BIOS that also adds DRM. It's nothing of the sort, most existing UEFI systems on OEM computers have a text based configuration tool and don't even secure boot. (Windows 8 mandates the change of the later of course.) Further, BIOS also had DRM capability.

UEFI is a complete replacement of BIOS. BIOS had a ton of restrictions related to all sorts of things, e.g. partition count and size on the bootable hard disk, BIOS requires POST (which in modern systems needlessly adds to the boot time) as well as a ton of reserved and now useless for decades interrupts. These new things that you find with UEFI (e.g. graphical configuration tool) are simply new features that UEFI allows for, but aren't required.

Stop calling it "X-Box", FFS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Few things make you seem as ignorant as when you insist on typing "X-Box" instead of "Xbox". I'm the biggest fucking grammar Nazi on the planet, but "Xbox" is a fixed string as it's a trademark. It doesn't matter if it "should" be "X-Box" or "X-box" or whatever -- it's *a fact* that it's "Xbox".

Re:HALO 1/2 and KOTOR

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of DirectX, duh.

TLDR Version

[wienerschnizzel]

Ok, these are the ACTUAL complaints in the article:

1) Microsoft has purposefully locked out small developers from contributing to XBox.

2) Cluttered interface that bombards the user with unnecessary and confusing pop-ups.

3) Apple may be able to get control of the console business if they open up their Apple Store ecosystem to Apple TV

Re:Another one? Sheesh.

[natbro]

i never claimed to have run the army. at best i was a grunt-turned-sergeant-awkwardly-promoted-to-captain who had the ears of the generals because i knew what we could build, who could build it, and i could describe it to everybody - i was boots on the ground. i'm just pointing out that i think the current strategy is wrong and will likely fail, not that i was running it better back in the day.