Microsoft Considered Giving Away Original Xbox 85
donniebaseball23 writes While the term 'Xbox' is firmly implanted in every gamer's mind today, when Microsoft first set out to launch a console in 2001, people weren't sure what to expect and Microsoft clearly wasn't sure what approach to take to the market. As Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley explained, "In the early days of Xbox, especially before we had figured out how to get greenlit for the project as a pure game console, everybody and their brother who saw the new project starting tried to come in and say it should be free, say it should be forced to run Windows after some period of time." Blackley added that other ideas were pushed around at Microsoft too, like Microsoft should just gobble up Nintendo. "Just name it, name a bad idea and it was something we had to deal with," he said.
AND they stole Halo from the PC world.... (Score:1)
I'm still peeved about that Bungie gobble up
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Agreed. if it weren't for Halo and the subsequent lock-in to that console, I suspect the XBox wouldn't have really gotten anywhere.
Consider that the XBox was still a massive money-sink for years on end, and I daresay that it has still not yet reached its overall ROI, let alone a profit. If it were built/sold by any company other than Microsoft (or similar behemoth-sized), the company would have gone broke years ago from it. They may eventually reach ROI and turn a profit, but I think that's still a couple o
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The Games division is net -300-400M over the last 12 years, up significantly since Q4 2012 where they were net -3B and the XBox One's losses are significantly smaller than the previous two generations at the same point in the cycle despite the recent price cuts. I'm not sure how much knowledge sharing there's been between the gaming division and the Azure division, but if the MS marketing is anywhere near the truth then it's likely that at least some of that groups significant profitability was gained throu
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You mean from the Apple/Mac world...
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Halo was going to be a Windows and Mac release: http://www.ign.com/articles/19... [ign.com]
Of course it would have been a different game anyway...
They might as well have. (Score:4, Insightful)
After all was said and done, the Xbox lost Microsoft 4 billion dollars. They bought their way in.
Re:They might as well have. (Score:4, Interesting)
More than that... in 2012, I had once estimated that they blew $7bn on the enterprise, and though they're raking in something like $200m/yr (IIRC) in profits now
(mostly from dev house licensing), they have yet to fill that titanic money hole they dug with the thing.
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More than that... in 2012, I had once estimated that they blew $7bn on the enterprise, and though they're raking in something like $200m/yr (IIRC) in profits now
(mostly from dev house licensing), they have yet to fill that titanic money hole they dug with the thing.
Value of brand recognition?
Being relevant in consumer products?
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Value of brand recognition?
So, wait - who exactly in the First World does not know what Microsoft is and does by now?
Being relevant in consumer products?
This one I can sort of agree with, though most of their efforts in this space have flopped spectacularly: MSNTV, Kin, PocketPC, Zune... I think the XBox was the only Microsoft product to date that hadn't crashed and burned insofar as consumer electronics are concerned.
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So, wait - who exactly in the First World does not know what Microsoft is and does by now?
It's know but they remain relevant by staying relevant.
Of course.
This one I can sort of agree with, though most of their efforts in this space have flopped spectacularly: MSNTV, Kin, PocketPC, Zune... I think the XBox was the only Microsoft product to date that hadn't crashed and burned insofar as consumer electronics are concerned.
Ok, so the rest of their attempts failed.
The Xbox didn't.
And that's bad because .. ? Not that you say it's bad. But it was on which worked. Good for Microsoft.
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microsofts brand name is shot and they know it. Compare the different console boxes. The ps4 and wii u have the company name displayed quite promiantly on them while the xbox one does. Nor did the xbox 360 or the original xbox.
Even on the zune device boxes microsoft was ashamed to put display their company name prominently on it.
And on phones they used the Nokia name to push their windows phones.
Fact is, outside of pc software and hardware, microsoft knows their brand name deters customers.
Part of the Plan (Score:2, Interesting)
EEE [wikipedia.org], they simply don't care. Apologies if you have been fooled into thinking there is some new and more altruistic MS Philosophy and I hurt your reality..
Dumping (Score:3, Funny)
I'm sure the U.S. Commerce Secretary and the FTC would've had a field day over this.
Re:Dumping (Score:4, Funny)
And, as usual, without having the slightest idea of what to do with the technology other than try to get market share.
So I'm forced to conclude most of the successes Microsoft has had in the last decade or more have largely been accidental instead of strategic, and that Microsoft just stumbles around in the dark until something works.
And then they spend years trying to understand why it worked in the first place and how to replicate it.
It's official, Microsoft is the Inspector Clouseau of the tech world.
That's pretty sad.
Re:Dumping (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with trying things and stumbling across a working product, solution or theory. That's what humans have been doing for as long as we have existed. Every company I've worked for have tried to introduce new services or products not knowing ahead of time if they would be successful. Some were, some weren't.
On a side note, MS has always taken tons of feedback from their partners, big and small. What they have done more recently is actually listen to the end users, something they lacked to do in the past.
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You know, when a multi-billion dollar company who spends more on R&D than pretty much everyone else hasn't the slightest idea of what they want to build a product for, and no clear picture for it ... that's pathetic
If one of the largest corporations is stumbling around like drunken monkeys and finding success through sheer accident, the the CEO is a grossly overpaid idiot who could be replaces with a bunch of drunken monkeys.
And yet I'm sure Ballmer or whoever it was got paid massive amounts of money to
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Tell us your thoughts on Google while you're at it.
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Lol
MS does me,too. Google loses small, wins big (Score:2)
Microsoft does "me too". Apple did well with the ipod, Microsoft called up China and ordered a cheap copy. Nintendo and the other companies had good game consoles, Microsoft stuck their name on one, apparently without having much of a clue about the market they were entering. They then lose a billion dollars or so on each, stubbornly refusing to admit failure.
Google checks out the market, then releases something that's best-in-class, or often fairly unique, being the first major offering of it's type. T
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So I guess Pfizer, Intel and Cisco must also be throwing out R&D money out the window since they spend higher percentages of their revenue than MS on R&D.
Please take the time to figure out what MS has actually achieved R&D wise before knocking it down with non factual information.
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You mean like cell phone plans where you get the phone for "free" but the services cost an arm and a leg?
Microsoft would have LOVED to have spun things that way and they may still.
BUT they ended up finally getting a killer app just in time (aka HALO). I remember when XBox launched there was piss all to play on it.
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Microsoft is in the process of doing just what cell phone providers did. Windows 10 will be free the first year. You can get Office 365 free for a year in so many ways. It won't be long before the switch is flipped, and you will be locked in to paying to continue using. There will probably be some changes made to file formats locking in you to using Microsoft to open files.
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Microsoft is in the process of doing just what cell phone providers did. Windows 10 will be free the first year. You can get Office 365 free for a year in so many ways. It won't be long before the switch is flipped, and you will be locked in to paying to continue using. There will probably be some changes made to file formats locking in you to using Microsoft to open files.
Not really. The offer expires after a year, not the upgrade. If you do not upgrade within that year, you'll have to pay. A subscription model was never mentioned.
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Terry Myerson (EVP OS):
"This is more than a one-time upgrade: once a Windows device is upgraded to
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Once the thing is no longer in one's possession there's a loss of a certain amount of control. Microsoft avoided this becoming epidemic by not handing out Xboxes for free, as most people weren't going to pay several hundred dollars to immediately wipe and install a different OS on it, but absolutely would have if they'd been free. People would have convinced anyone and everyone they knew to get a free one to giv
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Re:Government would've jumped on them (Score:5, Insightful)
I think OS/2 biggest failure was poor marketing compared to Microsoft.
I remember the OS/2 Warp commercials. Just a bunch of people sitting around a computer saying how cool it was then a bunch of trippy colors.
They didn't even show the OS.
While Microsoft for its Windows 95 campaign showed the OS and how easy it was to use, and some of the new features that would make you want it.
Apple does the same thing with their products they are trying to push. You have adds where they show the product and how easy it is to use.
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Yes, IBM was still sort of stuck thinking the PC was for serious corporate use. Maybe something to distract the executives while the actual workers were interacting with the mainframes (ie, real computers). So their mindset just didn't see the PC as a cheap system for home or small business or independent developers.
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I don't think the Office suite was a killer app. Initially many users hated Word especially for being inferior to what was already there, and Excel took off first on the Macintosh and Lotus 1-2-3 was still the king on the PC. It was a slower route to dominance that came from marketing the tools together rather than separately.
Windows itself really did not have a killer app, what really got it kickstarted and popular was that Microsoft made those OEM deals with the same vendors that they had DOS OEM deals
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OS/2 Warp's killer feature was an excellent TCP/IP stack, enabling people to use the Internet without voluminous and hacked-together third-party software. It also included one of the better graphical web browsers of the era.
If anything, it was ahead of its time.
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OS/2 Warp's killer feature was an excellent TCP/IP stack, enabling people to use the Internet without voluminous and hacked-together third-party software.
There was nothing wrong with Trumpet Winsock for modem users. For 10b2 users, the official microsoft stack was adequate. TGV Multinet was a high-performance stack for Windows 3.x which was more than adequate. Sure, you had to have third party software, but there was nothing particularly hackish about it. At the time, you had to deal with equally hacky software to get SLIP (let alone PPP) connectivity on most platforms. Only Unix-based and Unixlikes seem to have come with TCP back then.
Warp cost more than Wi
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Here's my own progression:
I used *I forget what* under MS-DOS to establish a PPP (SLIP? whatever) connection, ~1992, to a *nix host. It worked as well as MS-DOS could (and still does) allow.
Later, I used Telemate under MS-DOS to talk to the local Delphi dialup, to talk to Steve Jackson Games' Illuminati Online FreeBSD boxen.
Eventually, a local ISP showed up. I used Winsock on Windows, was disappointed: Things barely worked, which is saying a lot compared to all of the "barely worked" above.
I installed OS
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did 95 even support USB? i thought that was a 98 thing.
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I mused with my friends, "hey, it's a map of all of the OS/2 users in the world!"
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Jeez, they don't show many tech ads in my country but I remember seeing the old ipod ads and all they did was shown white silhouettes of people wearing a headphones and dancing with some kind of brick in their hands...
Those ads kickstarted apple rise to the top.
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OS/2 failed because:
It was more expensive.
It had higher hardware requirements.
It wasn't as compatible with existing software especially with DOS games.
It wasn't as compatible with 3rd party hardware.
I don't think the advertising had much to do with it at all.
"Apple does the same thing with their products they are trying to push."
um... maybe sometimes... but many signature apple commercials and ads do not show the product:
You might remember a few years of these?
https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com]
Or maybe these
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OS/2 failed because:
It didn't come pre-installed on all the brand name computers, even IBM's own. You couldn't order a Thinkpad with OS/2 out of the box, only with Windows.
"Little Brother" had this (Score:2)
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Microsoft did try and buy Nintendo in 1998 (Score:1)
There was an offer on the table for US$20B, but the owner in Japan turned it down over the objections of family members.
Good thing they didn't buy Nintendo (Score:2)
Or else Nintendo really would have been doomed. Just look at Rare. RIP