Microsoft’s corporate customers (the kind who buy Windows licenses by the thousand) would never allow Microsoft to cut off their air like that. If MS suddenly announced that MegaCorp’s 2-year-old Dell boxes would not run the next Windows or would no longer be eligible for support for the old Windows, MegaCorp and all the other big companies would all but burn Redmond to the ground. Microsoft is powerful, but they are still beholden to a lot of equally powerful interests. It’s likely, in fact, that the November rollout of Vista to corporate users is to allow early subscribers to Microsoft’s Software Assurance plan, who enrolled with the understanding that their subscription dollars would cover the next iteration of Windows, to get their bits before the contracts expire and they sue the pants off Microsoft.
Writing “spiffy new OSes,” as should be obvious now, is not something Microsoft can do very easily anymore. The successor to Windows XP was supposed to be out in 2003, then 2005, then 2006 … I think Taran is right and that whatever comes after Vista (Blackcomb) will be the last version of Windows as we know it; either Microsoft will collapse under its own weight or they’ll pull an Apple: dump the legacy code, put in a rudimentary compatibility layer for recent software/hardware, and start over. (A few 'Softies posting on Mini-Microsoft have said basically the same thing.) Of course, that puts Microsoft face to face with problem #1: they’ve delivered backward compatibility for so long their corporate customers can’t live without it.
The reason for the Xbox has been trasparently clear for anybody following Microsoft for the last 10 years. Microsoft believe in the vison of the digital hub which is a central machine mediates all the digital content in a home. It stores movies, pictures, music, controls your lights, streams data and seamlessly talks to all your consume appliances. Microsoft very much want to be the provider of this digital hub technology. They tried with WebTV, they tried with XP Media Centre Edition, they’re trying with the Xbox. It’s quite clear to them that the long term success of the company lies in being able to capture this digital hub and they’re prepared to spend any amount of money and failed attempts in order to get it.
They have a mountain of cash and lots of engineers so they can afford to spread themselves much wider than any other company in the arena. They’re betting if they plug away at it long enough, they’ll eventually hit it.
I’m in the game industry. When Microsoft first started making noises about the original XBox it was clear to a lot of us even then that what they **really ** cared about was control of the home internet portal.
They don’t care how much money they lose as long as when the Great Digital Convergence comes they wind up as the gatekeepers.
Here are the three companies in a nutshell:
[ul]Sony is interested in milking the existing game market.[/ul]
[ul]Nintendo is interested in expanding the existing game market.[/ul]
[ul]Microsoft is interested in using the existing game market as a stepping stone to bigger things.
[/ul]
Likewise Microsoft’s push into the already crowded “MP3 player” market with their wireless Zune device. They’re mighty late getting into the game but it must aggravate them no end to see all those music players out there that aren’t controlled by a MS portal. So even though there is absolutely no gaping void that can be filled by yet another music service/music player combo, they are leaping boldly into the breach.
Now it’s true that if * superbly executed *, a new service could take market share away from Apple (competing on price, or features, or ease of use), but I’ve seen Windows Media player, and “superbly executed” isn’t the way to bet.
There’s a lot of good answers in this thread, but also. . .forget that it’s Microsoft and Sony and consoles and games and digital hubs for a minute.
In a large, business sense, what you’re asking is:
Why did “company X” even “do Y” when “doing Y” turned out to be a failure? Did they think it wouldn’t be like this?
I can’t really speak to whether Xbox has been a big failure, but let’s say that it is. The answer is yes. Yes, they didn’t think it wouldn’t be like this. If there were perfect rules for making business decisions, no one would ever lose money.
Companies make decisions with risk. Some turn out good. Some turn out bad. If Microsoft hadn’t done Xbox, I suspect their shareholders would be asking, “how did the largest software company in the world miss out on the multi billion dollar game market?”
It’s still too early to tell anyway. I suspect a lot of the start-up costs associated with the R&D are now less of a drag. Microsoft has had more brand recognition through Xbox. I’m sure they’ve learned a lot of things coding wise, marketing wise, otherwise through Xbox. They’re probably now able to turn out newer versions of games and consoles cheaper than they were before. I wouldn’t worry about Microsoft.
But I don’t think that’s the case here. I think Microsoft went into XBox expecting to lose money on the first round of hardware and probably on this round as well. Their primary goal is control of the home internet portal, or if they can’t achieve that, at least to be a big enough player that they have a piece of the action. By that measure XBox is already a success, even if it’s losing money.
Why the hell are people always trying to make connections between things that have nothing to do with each other? The item taken could have been anything, but it looks like it’s being played up by the person who wrote that story that the violence was all about the Xbox.
One of my landlords when I was at university had a habit of coming over to the house they rented rooms out in to “clean” a couple of times a month, something which I had verbally agreed to when I rented the room. After requesting a few times for us to clean the dishes more often, and not let them sit out for a day or two, he took away everything except for one plate, one bowl, one set of silverware, and one glass for each of the five of us roommates. Some of the dishes were provided, as were some of the furnishings, for our use. However, some of those were my dishes, and he took them away with no notice or warning.
I drove to his house and was upset enough from both that incident and other problems I’d had with the little screwball that I ended up yelling at him and stopping just short of beginning to beating the crap out of him. If I’d laid one hand on him, I wouldn’t have stopped for a while. Over two years of relatively minor but repeated frustrations came to a head that day. If I’d beaten him up, undoubtedly what would be reported was that the fight started over some close to worthless dishes.
Bullshit. It was because of the constant invasion of privacy and passive-aggressive comments from a guy who tried to treat a 24 year old like a little kid.
This story is not about an Xbox. It’s about group violence. I’m sure that won’t stop other news outlets from making it into a “Gamers are Evil Consciousless Violent Monsters” issue though.