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XBox II Revealed, Maybe
aka-ed writes: "PC Format in the UK claims to have scooped the world with a look at Home Station, an apparent successor to XBox. A multimedia gateway that sits between you and that broadband window on the world, with MS the Gatekeeper. It looks cool, and it's a product of Satan! Who wants to be bad?" "Claims" is the operative word in the above. Update: 09/09 12:42 PM GMT by M : And it's even a duplicate story. Well, news is a little slow at zero-dark-thirty Sunday morning...
>Linux on the Xbox will be too cool (and spite :)
>MSFT like nothing other
Anyone taking bets that MS will try to get something into the license that would somehow make it a violation of the DMCA to run any other OS on this thing?
-l
I don't think you can claim GNU/Linux and the Internet have made proprietary software unecessary, nor can you claim this has led to M$'s decision.
Both of the two "revolutions" have meant that M$ has had a hard time keeping its foot in the server market, which has led to diminishing returns where usually frequent upgrades are necessary. Meanwhile most home and office desktop users rely on Windows, because GNU/Linux just isn't easy enough for them, nor is it marketed half as well as Windows. So Microsoft still dominates the desktop market, and still has a foot in the server market. The point is that people aren't buying new computers or operating systems as much any more because the market is nearing saturation - almost everyone has now bought a PC. This is why they've deliberately made Windows XP so incompatable - to drive more sales.
M$ have realised that software won't be able to suppor them anymore, so they've gone back to hardware. So yeah, it's gone full circle in a sense, but not for the reasons you cite. It seems M$ are finally aiming for Bill Gates' dream which he outlines in his awful book "The Road Ahead" - a world where electronic gadgets and computers fit seamlessly into our homes, and everything we do runs off Microsoft software and Microsoft connections.