Xbox Originator: "Stupid, Stupid Xbox!!" 245
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:Primary Problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
And how is "all about sales" any different than Sony or Nintendo's gaming platforms?
It isn't. For that matter, how can gaming platforms like PCs with Steam be wildly popular and expanding into the platform market with the Steambox (while remaining wildly more popular than game platforms in general right now, I might add) exist when they are, essentially, JUST game sales and delivery systems?
Sorry, the Xbox is floundering for the same reason that things like capable entry level Android tablets come to market at $100 and smartphones sell for $500+ and people barely even blink at the price. The truth is that platform gaming is dying, even with the novelty of things like Kinect. People don't really want to game on their TVs anymore, they want something personal. The TV has become peripheral to home/personal entertainment, not central, and when people can get 90% of the same thing with any given game console, or 70% of what those consoles offer and a little bit more with a modern set-top box, it makes very little financial sense to continue with the "sell the console at a loss" model that Microsoft popularized, never mind anything between that and the Nintendo approach. (Look at sales models - hardly any console did well this past Christmas.)
The entire commercial idea of console gaming needs to be rethought and revitalized or it's simply not going to make a hill of beans how innovative they are.
Re:Bill needed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Primary Problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
The new generation of consoles may end up being doomed *for gaming*. That isn't for certain, but it's possible. They've found a better market to sell the devices to (less than half of time spent on the 360 is spent playing video games). Gaming consoles used to be marketed toward gamers. Now they'll be catering and marketing to people who just want to watch Hulu and download the latest "music" video from the retarded flavor of the month.
As someone who enjoys gaming, across the board, I'd be disappointed in that. As someone who prefers PC gaming, I welcome it. Ditch your gaming fans and watch them flock to the PC.
Re:Bill needed (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it was when Bill left. A quick look at the history of Balmer shows that he is very big on slaying dragons but not very big on plundering their hoards. Even worse, he prefers to attack without a technological advantage, instead preferring to rely on the massive cash of MS. He took on Google with Bing, the Playstation with XBox, the iPod with Zune, the iPhone and Android with Windows Phone, the iPad with Surface RT, Java with .NET, and Flash with Silverlight. How many of these were big successes?
Compare this to Jobs, who took failed and under-realized ideas (portable music player, tablets, digital music, etc.) and made them work well. Even their PCs and laptops are based on the system model that MS largely destroyed decades earlier in the home market, relegating it to scientific, business, and other specialized applications.
The contrast is like night and day: one struck while the competitors were weak and executed well to carry the day; the other struck while the competitors were strong and executed mediocrily, at best, using massive cash to carry the day.
Re:Daily Microsoft bitch-fest (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it does need "all that bullshit." Booting from anything except an on-board hard disk controller on a PC BIOS is a hackjob. It's just an absolutely horrible clusterfuck. The fact that it ever works at all is a testament to the hard work put in over the past 20+ years by all the bootable expansion card makers.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but your comment really makes me think that you've never used anything except a desktop PC. In the server world, you always boot from an expansion card -- note that onboard NICs count as expansion cards in this context, because the BIOS can't boot from them directly; it has to pass control to the NIC's BIOS, which handles PXE -- at least once in the server's life to kickstart it. And there are a good number of situations where you never boot from a local hard disk. That's not just PXE. It also includes iSCSI and FC HBAs, ROMs or flash devices, RAID controllers, and probably a raft of things that I've simply never encountered.
I think that OpenBoot would've been a better choice than UEFI, personally. But I don't think any knowledgeable person can dispute the need for something better than the 1980s-era PC BIOS.
Re:Bill needed (Score:5, Interesting)
it gets worse...
With ballmer under control they took winning ideas and killed them. For example, .NET and C# did become very successful. What did they do? They killed it in the "new" paradigm called Windows 8.
they had one of the most successful third party dev program and they killed it. Compare the price of MSDN universal when Gates was under control, and when Ballmer was under control. It is not funny! I did a price comparison of Linux, OSX, and Windows as a development environment for a small business or consultant. In this price comparison I included the price of hardware since you do need computers to run things.
Guess which was the cheapest... Drum roll Linux. Guess which was the most expensive? Drum roll Windows, and by quite a bit! OSX was only a bit more expensive than Linux. Windows was just downright expensive when you add things like Office, Windows Server, MSDN development (not talking the universal package, just the 1200 USD package).
What shocked me is that OSX is not that much more expensive than Linux. For hardware does cost quite a bit if you do an apples to apples comparison (excuse the pun). Granted that Apple is still more expensive for the same hardware, but it is not as much as I thought it was.
X Square Circle (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone know why he named it XBOX?
Because when you put your thumbs on a PlayStation controller, the right thumb covers buttons marked with an X and a square (that is, a box). Even 360 refers to a circle, which is also a PlayStation button [uncyclopedia.co].