Anyone who calls the Xbox a failure has no clue. It's the big winner in this round of console wars. It's the only multimedia device that's networked to millions of PCs and hooked up to millions of computers.
It maybe hasn't sold as many units as the Wii, but the games per console stat is a blowout. As are paid downloads of content, third party games, etc.
And yeah, the red ring of death sucks (has happened to me a few times) but that's how they beat the PS3 to market and won the generation. In the end the 1 year lead is worth whatever they had to eat on that.
What's the total profit from Xbox? Considering the complete package - total investment etc from start to finish? Quite a large loss.
There's been one clear winner and that's the wii - unless you're looking for something other than cold hard cash profit, and I suspect number of units in peoples living rooms.
In terms of hardware, the xBox absolutely sucks. I use it rarely because the thing is so loud with its 100 fans. I have a quieter washing machine. If MS were going after the 'living room multimedia device', they failed spectacularly. The large HDD is also rendered useless, since you still have to put game discs in for 'copy protection purposes'.
If you include the 1st generation, you may well be correct. But the 2nd generation has been profitable.
And that first generation as a loss-leader was essential to produce the results of this current (and future) generations. So that seems far less like a loss than it does an investment.
Truth is, every company in the hardware space (Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and lesser companies like Tivo) all understand that when it comes to moving hardware units, we've got them in the cubicles first, then the home offices, then the bedrooms. The big untapped markets are the living rooms, pockets and cars.
And it seems obvious as anything to me that the xBox, PS3, etc, are not about gaming consoles. They're about getting a multimedia PC attached to your TV. Gates saw this as the next big thing 15 years ago. That's why they bought WebTV! Microsoft and a score of other companies have determined that the living room will be a very profitable market and they've been willing to drop a few dollars to get there.
>> "They're about getting a multimedia PC attached to your TV."
The problem is, the xBox is absolutely unusable as a media thing. It's ridiculously noisy, big, and useless. A mac mini beats it hands down. Or any small lightweight PC. The xBox still doesn't even have a browser for the love of god. We live in a time when new calculators probably have web browsers included.... but not the xBox.
I've used the Xbox to watch media almost every day since the day it launched. I download all my files through bittorrent, stream them to the Xbox. I also use PlayOn to let me watch Hulu there.
It's not too noisy if you have the latest version and aren't running a DVD. A Mac Mini is not better (though it is smaller and quieter) and it's significantly more expensive and harder to use for living room applications. I know because I tried.
The Wii has a browser, and I've used it once and then only to check it out. Wtf would I want a browser on my TV for? All the Xbox needs is a YouTube app, and then there'd be no reason for one.
I have wii, xbox, mac mini hooked up in the living room.
wii: family games (Agreed, the browser is crappy, no keyboard, etc), but games are best for kids/family.
xbox: guitar hero, good if someone wants to shoot random stuff or do real racing games.
mac mini: browser, youtube, photos, play backed up dvds, movie trailers, itunes, etc etc.
IMHO The UI in the xbox isn't good, and their insistance on reimplementing the web in 'apps' isn't one that I agree with - facebook, twitter integration? Just use a browser. I just simply can't stand to use the xBox more than is really necessary. It's painful :/ Whilst everyone else is moving towards the web as a platform, Microsoft still seems to think the web is irrelevant.
You miss the point of a monopoly -- Microsoft is able to eat losses to take over markets as long as they have a safe cash cow.
Then, the monopolist have a new "owned" area to milk money out of, for taking over the next application type.
The result is that in the process of getting a monopoly of something, there is lots of development. Then, the developers/money is being sunk elsewhere and the development speed in the monopoly areas are really low.
That is why you haven't seen any revolutionary changes in e.g. office products for quite a few years. Which we all lose by, since productivity isn't increased.
(Or maybe there just haven't been any new possible ideas in writing documents? Hardly. Computer linguistics hasn't been standing still the last decade.)
The problem is that unless the 360 can make up for the losses of the first XBox, they are still losers. They'll either need that to happen or they'll need to continue profitability with their 3rd console.
It's easy to say that MS has taken over the "gamer" market but we thought the same thing when Sony dominated with the PS and PS2. It's clearly a market whose leader can be taken down: The rise and fall of Sega. The rise and fall and rise of Nintendo. Sony and Microsoft coming out of nowhere to take over.
My point was that Microsoft only need to up the investment speed enough that everyone are in the red.
The non-monopolists will have to give up in the end. Then the monopolist can stay and earn lots of money for generation n, n+1, n+2, ...
(I think this is a classic example in economy, but for bakeries (?). A big chain goes into a geographic area and undercuts the prices of the small bakeries. After a while they close. Then the prices are raised to higher than ever before -- to pay for undercutting prices in the next area.)
There are two things working against that idea: 1) monopolies are illegal in most countries that you'd be targeting and 2) achieving monopolies in most markets is difficult.
In your bakers analogy, the barrier to entry is low enough that other bakers could set up shop and create competition. The video game console market is large enough that there will always be some company that could pounce on an opportunity. In fact, it's happened twice in recent history. Sony with the PS1 and Microsoft with the XBox.
1) Uhm, hello... Microsoft pays their fines and laughs all the way to the bank -- or use regulatory capture. (How many years has the EU been trying to get usable documentation for network standards?!)
2) Uhm, hello... Microsoft and different application areas? History contradicts you here, too.
(Then, I don't know enough about Sony/PS1, but Microsoft entering areas like this is a bit outside of their normal behavior, but open source will change their home market.)
How did such a lame fanboy rant get upmodded so highly?
Wii sales are double Xbox 360 and PS3, the sales of Wii Fit (bluetooth connected bathroom scales!) are more comparable in number.
Microsoft invested Billions in this and after two generations they're sparring with a self-destructing Sony for a distant second place.
I agree that it's not all about games or marketshare, but building a big, noisy, failure-prone box and backing the wrong horse in Hi-Def media aren't exactly great moves in the media centre space even if the latter failure got them belatedly onto the right track of movie downloads.
Lifetime, Xbox lost money. Their bet is that Project Natal will crush Wii. MS lost on the first years, they're making a profit since Halo 3 launch (yearly, at least until 2008 fiscal quarter)
The Xbox 360 has been a success for MS, it displaced Sony. But they made the mistake of focusing on replacing the number one, and forgot the whole, which Nintendo acquired.
If the market was a cake, 360's won a slice, but Nintendo baked more.
I thought Project Natal belonged more to the Cairo, WinFS and Windows for Pen Computing bin, namely, vaporware products that don't work nearly as well as advertised (Milo and Kate? gimme a break), pre-announced by many, many months (if not years) and designed to create a FUD atmosphere that hurt the sales of competitors.
Why even do it, then? Why have these stores?
Propaganda.
Phil Schiller of Apple made the point back in January
when he explained that Apple stores had 400,000 visitors
per day or the equivalent of 20 Macworld shows EVERY DAY.
Microsoft wants the same thing. They want to bypass the
press machine that they feel has tainted users against
Windows Vista, making sure the same thing doesn’t happen
to Windows 7.
If Microsoft can achieve that one goal – just that one –
then the Microsoft stores will have been worth doing even
if they never have a dollar of retail sales.
Vista failed partially because of poor development (and all the other usual reasons proclaimed a thousandfold), but also because Microsoft lost control of its perception to bloggers. The pundits were able to set the perception of the software, and they said it was crap. I'm not arguing that it wasn't crap, I'm just saying it was perceived as crap from the get-go by people who'd never tried it.
Not so with Windows 7. After reading Cringely's article I became attuned to signs that Microsoft might be tweaking the perception of the OS through its gloved hands. Not by ghosting outright shills (this failed notoriously with Vista), but through more subtler means.
Like what? Like the perception that the Windows 7 experience on netbooks will be similar to the desktop experience. Although this has never been proclaimed outright (Microsoft said Windows 7 'will be designed to work with' netbooks), the murmur from the great unwashed that I'm getting is that Windows 7 will be the snappy because they've 'sunk the bloat' and made it work on netbooks.
Well hang on a moment and let's see. The only thing of which I'm convinced is that Microsoft has done a far better job of managing the perception of Windows 7 this time around, and I expect to see more of these types of articles ('Microsoft has finally become insanely OK again!') leading up to the release of Windows 7. (Please note these are merely my observations and I'm not implying 'mini-microsoft' is a shill, see your doctor if pain persists).
As a product it clearly failed. It did not meet its sales numbers at all, they had to extend XP's life over and over and finally killed the gift horse so that Vista would be installed on machines by default. Many people would choose XP over Vista if they could on their machines. I think most people would reasonably call it a failure from a business perspective.
I'm not sure you can say Microsoft has turned any corner. I do agree that Bing is a fair piece of software (even if it is long, long over due). However, Bing is too little, too late. IE 8 is a solid browser compared to IE 7 and I'm glad MS is taking steps to produce a browser that can compete with the features of the other 'name brand' browsers. Those ads MS is running though? I thought the Apple ads were smug-they have nothing on the price-comparing ads MS is running.
This is ridiculous. You're attacking them for not being an effective internet media company. Are you going to go after GM and Chrysler because they haven't launched their own search engines too?
To "turn the corner", Microsoft needs to stop its Apple bleeding and make the Office, Windows Server and .NET stack more competitive in the cloud. That's their core business.
I do most of my development in C#/.NET, and I have to say you're right. I think their next step should be towards getting all of their desktop programming into the .NET API; they didn't have time to do it in Windows 7, but perhaps for Windows "8". I'm talking about things like drivers (which can be programmed using the now-free .NET Micro Framework) and lower-level APIs (like writing a screensaver...it should just be a class implementing IScreensaver or whatever, and not written in C any longer).
Getting everything (or as much as possible) switched over to the .NET framework in Windows would also help a great deal as far as mitigating security risks as well.
Not to miss the point of your message, but screensavers can be programmed in any language. I made one in .NET. The only constraint is the program needs to accept some command line parameters.
But I agree, it should be an abstract class/interface.
Having the ability to do more system programming on .NET (without having to P/Invoke all over the place) would (should?) make a lot of it significantly easier and faster. Also, the security issue is not to be overlooked -- with managed drivers and lower-level libraries, there'd be a much lower chance of fatal security bugs (e.g. buffer overflows). Also, writing this code in .NET allows developers to take advantage of a great number of new testing tools like Pex and Code Contracts (for fuzzing and static analysis, respectively).
Also, .NET 4.0 includes some additions for doing parallel processing to help developers take advantage of multi-core processors. I've been playing around with it for about a month now (I'm writing an open-source managed numerics library in C#) and the new parallel stuff is really quite good.
I would love to see .NET better integrated into the actual operating system. I agree completely with you.
Also, it's worthwhile to mention that .NET is available and usable freely (albeit limited features in VS, but not THAT limited), and let's not forget that start ups can get full access to plenty of the software through http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/BizSpark/Pages/FAQ.aspx
I like the direction Microsoft is taking the company, I hope it continues.
Does anyone use Azure? It was years behind everyone else when it was introduced, like most Microsoft "technology" and won't Office 2010 just be another version of Office? Isn't Windows7 just Vista "fixed"?
Rather than take steps in the right direction, it sounds like MS tripping over their own feet trying to get a course correction.
Wait, Azure's not even live yet, I don't think. And they (like Google) are avoiding the issue with spinning up instances that you have with Amazon's cloud services.
Quite frankly, the only software of Microsoft's that I've ever been impressed with is their Office Suite, and even that has gone down hill in the last few years. What they really need to do is stick to the basics. They need to stop wasting resources in fields they are obviously not good at. They /had/ a strong Office platform, they should improve on that. (and by improve, I don't mean "add more features"). If they want to succeed in the OS market, they have to find a niche. Its hard to compete with free. Apple does it by having excellent design and customer service. Apple sells the experience. What does Microsoft sell? Software that companies are too entrenched in. That's no market at all, at least not for long. Now if Window's could claim to be truly secure, and truly quick, and truly light on resources, I might actually use it. In the meantime, free satisfies all my needs.
How has the Office Suite gone downhill in the last few years?
Office 2007 was a major innovation from my point of view. The company threw out an established, yet underperforming UI, taking a huge risk. But it's payed off in greater usability and learnability. The Ribbon user interface (imho) blows away other office suite interfaces.
And the ribbon is a relatively new user experience for such a product as well. This was a huge risk for them considering how widespread office was, but it goes to show you that Microsoft can indeed produce a quality product.
I use open office on my home computers, but at work I use Office 2007, I loathe having to spend time in OpenOffice now, because the interface and usability for Office 2007 is just so pleasant to me.
It maybe hasn't sold as many units as the Wii, but the games per console stat is a blowout. As are paid downloads of content, third party games, etc.
And yeah, the red ring of death sucks (has happened to me a few times) but that's how they beat the PS3 to market and won the generation. In the end the 1 year lead is worth whatever they had to eat on that.