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Ballmer - Xbox 'Can Take Sony' In Next Generation
An anonymous reader writes "According to GameSpot, a Q&A with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has him saying that, although the company's Xbox game console isn't making money (or bleeding them dry), the pain has been worth it. 'We have gone from nowhere to a significant player,' he said, adding: 'I am betting we can take Sony in the next generation.' Guess things are set to get even more interesting with the forthcoming next-gen console launches."
It's called Dumping. If they did that Nintendo or Sony could file a complain in each area of the world and have it stopped. MS would be fined and a duty to make up the difference would be imposed.
MS is probably skating close to the edge as it is with their current pricing.
Help fight continental drift.
"They are not dominating the PDA market like they wanted to."
Actually, they are. Since the launch of Pocket PC, Windows CE devices have been growing in marketshare consistantly. In fact, the #1 PDA manufacturer isn't PalmOne anymore, it's HP.
"They are slowly but surely losing the server market."
They can't lose what they never had. Microsoft never owned the server market.
"Microsoft is where IBM was in 1980. They are on top, but headed for a fall. The reason? Because despite the rhetoric, Microsoft can't innovate. They can only copy."
IBM is still a $90 billion a year company. There was no IBM "fall". They are still very much alive and kicking.
"Despite reams of hype and much marketting muscle on Microsoft's part, Sony still sells ten Playstations for every Xbox."
Statistically, you're full of crap. At the beginning of this year, Microsoft had sold 13.5 million XBOX consoles. Sony has sold 50 million PS2 consoles. That's 3.7 to one, not the ten to one you quote.
And, remember, PS2 launched over a year and a half earlier than XBox.
"Because despite the rhetoric, Microsoft can't innovate. They can only copy."
When Apple rips off features from Windows XP (fast user switching, video chat, disk encryption, save window with places on left), it's "innovating". When Microsoft invents these features, it's "copying".
"They are not the king of set top boxes."
Carriers deploying Microsoft TV based products:
- Comcast Cable (largest cable operator in world)
- Megacable (largest cable operator in Mexico)
- Bell Canada
- Swisscom (largest broadband provier in Switzerland)
- Reliance Infocomm (largest broadband provider in India)
They are using a different CPU(IBM RISC), a new GPU(ATI) adding there own microcode to the CPU to stop people doing what they have been doing to the current XBox.
Sony is using a different CPU (Cell), and probably a different GPU, why doesn't the same argument apply to them?
and then there is Live I would say there will have to re-write most of that as well.
Why would they have to do that? Nothing that runs on the servers needs to change very much.
MS has never writen software for RISC in the past and I think that the time frame they have set themself is very unrealistic.
They wrote Windows NT for the DEC Alpha (a 64 bit RISC processor) and supported it until NT 4, and they have Windows CE which runs on ARM's RISC processors.
they have partnered up with some good people to bring the PS 3 to life
Microsoft has "partnered up" with IBM and ATI. Are they not "good people"?
Saying "one large monopoly against another" completely defies the definition of Monopoly. What you describe is an Oligopoly and is a non-ideal form of competition. As a previous poster pointed out, an ideally competitive market has a large number of producers and consumers which allows the buyers to determine the price of goods. In an oligopoly each producer has a large enough market share to exert control over the market. This is what lets Microsoft have such an effect on the market. They can depress the market price by selling at less than cost. In the short run this is good for consumers.
Microsoft, however, has no intention of doing what's good for consumers. Their goal is to eventually force Sony to sell bellow cost and make the market un-profitable for them. Whether this is feasible depends on more than simple economics so it is by no means a foregone conclusion. The best case for consumers would be to have numerous, interoperable choices in consoles so the number of producers isn't limited to a select few. The one sure thing is that Microsoft won't start any movements in that direction.
Okay cocksucker, I am going to try to use as small words as possible so that I don't lose you. You're really making yourself look stupid here. Let's run with your definition of dumping [the link you provided]
"It provides a legal remedy to counteract low-priced competition in the
U.S. market from foreign producers who are allegedly "dumping" -- that
is, selling goods at prices below those in their own home market (price
discrimination) or below their fully allocated cost of production (sales
below cost) -- so as to cause injury to a U.S. industry."
So, when you said that selling below cost is dumping and put that "period" nonsense on the end to signify that you were quite sure, you were wrong. Selling below cost is dumping if it causes injury to a U.S. industry. Last time I checked, Sony and Nintendo were both Japanese companies and MS was a U.S. company. You cite a case that you supposedly worked on [an obvious lie] where Korean manufacturers were prosecuted. Tell me, you originally stated that the government would go after MS - does that make any sense at all? If MS sells their consoles at a huge loss, a U.S. industry is not harmed and, in fact, the high sell through that the original poster was assuming, is helping a U.S. industry because MS is an American company. I mean, for fuck's sake, everything the link you provided is dealing with foreign producers. You're a fucking moron. Can you not see that you're incredibly stupid here? MS selling at $50 is perfectly acceptable because the dumping link you provide is not talking about sales on the
home market!! You worked on a dumping case? Didn't get much out of it, did you? MS can sell in the United States at whatever price they want and U.S. dumping laws are not going to apply at all because the U.S. is Microsoft's home market, you fucking toolshed! Jesus Christ, you are the dumbest motherfucker ever.
Please, don't ever post on Slashdot ever again. You are too stupid. I wish there was an exam to get access to the Internet. YOU WOULD FAIL, MORON!!!
'We have gone from nowhere to a significant player,' he said
Welcome to Bizarro World, where the Xbox is a significant player, rather than being challenged in sales by the PS1 and WonderSwan!
(Disclaimer: I live in Japan, where the Xbox's popularity level is somewhere around "the whowhat?". Is the Xbox doing any better in the West?)
> MS has never writen software for RISC in the past
Not true. NT was originally deveoped for MIPS and each version was ported to Intel, Alpha and PowerPC.
Of course this was in C, so it wasn't a big deal.
A furry is somebody who wishes they were a animal.
They sometimes actually beleive they are animals, and if not, at least spiritally a animal in a sudo-native american indian / egyption god / completely bogus bullshit type of way.
They also get sexually excited by fantasies of twisted half-animal/half-anime creatures fucking each other and often draw bad artwork of this. People with fur, fox heads, tails, and huge detailed penises giving blow jobs to each other. They want to be those creatures.
That sort of thing.
Also dress up in full body mascot animal costumes and run around in hotel convention halls and make websites of them dressed up in these fur suites, along with their bad sexual bestiality artwork, and sudo angst/spiritual discussions in rambiling message boards.
Then they get all up tight when they are made the laughing stock of the entire internet, and considure it persecution by evil "humans" similar to the way that "mother earth" is being "raped" by George Bush, hunters, and large oil companies.
Basicly the type of people that call god "her" because it sounds more enlightened and it freaks the squares.
The sort of people that you feel sorry for until they are caught fingering your household pet's anus with their underwear down and no pants on. Then you realise why people hate them.
And they've found each other. On the internet...
It sounds like you define "fall" as a complete failure or bankruptcy of a company. Not so. IBM of today is a major player in IT. However, during the 80's, they were THE voice of business IT. They owned the market. They set standards. Heck - the IBM PC didn't become popular because it was first to market, most powerfull, least expensive, or first to provide the business computing killer app. But it was a success in business because businesses wanted microcomputers and IBM had one to offer.
Not anymore. Today's IBM competes with other major players in the market; their position in the market fell. Which is a good thing. Unless you're business is IBM's business.
Nintendo isn't very old at all.
Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card company. Their first electronic game system product was a line of light-triggered gun gallery machines in 1972. They first entered the console market in some fashion later in the 70s as the Japanese distributor of the Magnavox Oddysey console. As the 70s continued they released three home game systems in the "Color TV Game" series, each of which was a small thingy you could hook up to a TV to play one of a number of Pong-like games that were hardwired in to the unit.
In 1980 they released both the Game and Watch line, as far as I'm aware the first handheld electronic gaming product, and their first in-house developed game, Shigeru Miyamoto's "Donkey Kong", an arcade game that was also released for a number of home console systems.
Of course, the first Nintendo product that was an in-house developed console gaming system with games stored on removeable media was the NES, which wasn't released until... 1985, making it the first successful video gaming product in the aftermath of the great crash of the video game market.
...what exactly are your criteria for "old"?
(source)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Have you ever heard of Metal Gear Solid? How about Metroid Prime? Or Grand Theft Auto and its sequels? All American games, huge successes in the American market.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that there are some excellent "made in USA" games out there, but I think you chose three *really bad* examples, since none of these games you mentioned are 100% American - in fact, two of them are not American *at all*:
Metal Gear Solid series: made by Konami, a Japanese company, in Japan.
Metroid Prime: created in USA by Retro Studios with the cooperation / guidance of Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto and his personal team - in other words, a joint effort between a Japanese company and an American one.
Grand Theft Auto series: Rockstar Games is a British company and the games were created there, AFAIK. Please correct me if I am wrong.
P.S.: If you were thinking about MGS: the Twin Snakes, just replace replace "Metroid Prime" with "Metal Gear Solid", "Retro Studios" with "Silicon Knights", "Nintendo" with "Konami", and add Hideo Kojima alongside Shigeru Miyamoto.
Umm...Apple hardly ripped off any of these features from Microsoft and certainly not from XP. I remember full on video conferencing in the early '90s with "budget" UNIX workstations like the SGI Indy. (We are talking pre Win95 here - back in the Microsoft stone age.)
The encrypted file system introduced in OS X is actually based upon some NeXT technology. (And NeXT is even older than those SGI Indy systems...or did you also miss the part of history when Steve Jobs brought over all the engineers from NeXT and took over Apple?) Anyway, NeXT had an encryption API (for use by applications) for fast elliptic encryption. Go read a little about the encrypted file system in OS X and you will find, well, how about that - fast elliptic encryption!
Also, OS X is UNIX based and UNIX systems are inherently multi-user. The "fast user switching" (and remote desktop stuff) just exposed the multi-user guts of the OS in a user friendly way. (Yes, NeXT also had stuff like remote desktop - login to any machine on the LAN and see your files and apps as if you were sitting at your own box.)
Its just taking time for the OS guys at Apple to take all the good ideas from what came before and fit them together in a logical way in OS X.
In many ways, the "modern" Windows UI (95, 98, NT4, 2000) actually borrow from the NeXT UI. In my opinion, XP tried to do something new with the UI and it turned out pretty bad where as OS X also tried to do something new with the UI and (while somewhat rough at first) is actually getting pretty damn good!
Warning : Swear words (is there an auto-filter for this?)
Look, I'm sorry, and I do not care how badly I get modded down for this, but I am TIRED of hearing "The XBox has done well for its time as a newcomer" blah blah blah. I call bullshit.
The problem is that the X-Box will never make a goddamn dime. Well whoopty do, how much of an accomplishment is placing yourself in 2nd-ish place if you haven't made a dime off it? Shit, I could sell cars for $5000 less than Ford, outsell them, and put myself $3 million in the hole, but does that mean I won?
And then comes the "Microsoft has all the money in the world" people who will not bother to RTFPost all the way and response anyway, but this doesn't fly either. Investors aren't going to be happy if a portion of Microsoft is constantly in the hole. It's a company, like any other, and investors must be listened to eventually.
Mind you, I love my X-Box and wouldn't mind if Nintendo and Microsoft just sat down, made one system (with Nintendo's console and Microsoft's hardware expertises combined like some twisted two-company version of Voltron) and took over. Now people in both countries are willing to buy it and developers get their needs addressed. Of course it won't happen, so I'll drop the tangent here.
The point is, the X-Box has accomplished nothing worth bragging about. Microsoft's been throughing cash away in the MSN bin for years, this doesn't mean they're brilliant. All it's really done is set up a false game economy that'll come crashing down if investors pull the plug on the X-Box 2.
Note that the only way to make the system proffitable in the enxt generation will be to cut costs so they aren't losing money through their asses, leaving them with a system that won't even have the same consumer pull the original did (basiscally everything the PS2 does but a fuck-ton better, hardware-wise. Hell, if every PS2 3rd party- scratch that, if Squaresoft and Namco made X-Box ports of and launched them simultaneously with all their PS2 games, the X-Box would have WON.... in the US, maybe Japan, who knows). Yes, consumers have loyalty, but that loyalty will be strongest towards the PS2. I mean, how many GC/X-Box owners made that their FIRST system? Usually it was because PS2 owners had a moment of boredome and weakness (e.g. exclusive title, e.g. Halo, Resident Evil, and Smash Melee) and picked one up for the hell of it. Next gen, everyone launches simultaneously, and 80% of Japan's developers are putting all their steam into the PS3, it doesn't matter what Microsoft does in the slightest short of buy the rights and port every PS2 game during its development cycle. (Which would rock.)
Fock, that is all.
Rockstar North is in Edinburgh, Scotland. Rockstar Games and Take Two are in NYC. Developer in Scotland, Publisher/Owners in NYC. Still supports my point of being outside Japan.
IIRC:
Grand Theft Auto, Getaway, Sing Star, Eye Toy, Tomb Raider, Lemmings, Worms, Rare games, Peter Molyneux games all developed in UK.
Prince of Persia etc. developed in Canada.
The Sims etc. developed in USA.
Wierd games with quirky characters (Oddworld, Heart of Darkness) developed in France
Settlers developed in Germany
Tetris devised in Russia, but ported everywhere. Some new wierd PC games (perimeter) from CIS countries also.
Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy from Japan.
The Hobbit, Way of the Exploding fist, etc. from Australia.
No one country has a monopoly on game development, but there are differences in traditions between the main areas.
no dumping only counts if you are only selling at a loss in one market to kill competion, but selling at profit in another where you are already in control of the significant market share.
The above post isn't insightful, it's wrong. "99% of all successful console games in the past 20 years have been from Japan." I know of a number of successful console games that never even came out in Japan or took a while to localise and were already into high profits before reaching the Japanese market. I'm sure most other readers can list games that aren't Halo that have been successful. Lets start, Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell - infact all of the Tom Clancy franchise, GTA and spinoffs.. naah, I'm bored of this it's too easy.
;-)
"Japan is EXTREMELY Xenophobic" What evidence do you have to back up such a broad statement? Do the Japanese buy in massivley to American culture? Yup, I think they may... Do you think it's impossible for non Japanese consumer goods to take off in Japan?
There is a global console and games market and Japan whilst being a big market, isn't big enough to make the others insignificant - infact I very much doubt it's as big as the European and Amererican markets.
Your point 2 may have been valid - in the 80's that may have been all that was required of a hardware manufacturer, however the XBox really has changed the landscape of console development - for the developer. Compared to MS Sony is, unfortunatley very unhelpful and arrogant in their treatment of developers. Frankly they need to wake up and start supporting the developers in a similar way to MS. The XBox toolchain and libraries are where it's at - that's why they're bringing them to PC games development too. If Sony don't have some way to counter that then they're going to find it costs the developer a lot more to get similar results out of their machine. Result; less titles are going to go Sony's way if the XBox2 can get a large enough market share - say it gets a 10-15% market share, that'll be big enough for developers to be profitable doing XBox only without having to have a number 1 hit every time.
Microsoft has also innovated really well within the console market - XBox live is a fantastic system that people who use it really love and doesn't have an equivalent with any other brand. Live will be being extended and improved for XBox 2 and what will Sony's answer be - not a web cam surley? Eye-Toy was meant to change the way we play games - it's more a gimmick though at the moment.
Finally it's really clear that Microsoft are very serious about XBox 2, just as they were about XBox (which incedentally has been more sucessful than they predicted - yup but it's still lost money but that was expected).
XBox 2 was always where it was going to get interesting so this new round of consoles is going to be extremely interesting. I'm very much looking forward to it because with games choice is very important and a monopoly over platform is a really bad thing. Sony have refused many very very cool 2D games, simply for being 2D. As Sony own the platform if you don't have their approval, you can't publish. This stifles innovation and encourages publishers to only create sequels and go for well know and defined genres.
Hmm, rant over
Well it was DEC that wrote NT for the Alpha mostly and when MS stopped building it for DEC then most of the guy moved back to DEC and I am pretty sure you will find that the the guys that ported CE to RISC worked for the chip makers(I could be wrong in this case)
"Sony is using a different CPU (Cell), and probably a different GPU, why doesn't the same argument apply to them?"
That is easy, Sony never had a problem with people running Linux on the PS 2, that is not the case with MS they went to great pains to try a stop it. The fact that i know quite a few people that have turned there XBox into media center. I think the reson MS has gone for the RISC with there own microcode is to stop people doing what they have been doing to the XBox.
"The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose." - James Baldwin, American author
1. Japan is EXTREMELY Xenophobic. They aren't going to sell out their extremely LARGE console market to a "Gaijin" company without VERY good reason.
As a resident of Japan, I can never understand why Microsoft's collosal incompetence in Japan is blamed on some sort of Japanese xenophobia. MS released a system that was huge, whose clock got reset when unplugged (unplugging peripherals is very common in Japan to save on electric costs), which scratched customer CDs and DVDs and then told those consumers to just "ignore it, it's no big deal", which featured as a flagship game aimed at adults "Sneakers", which got a 34% on gamerankings.com, as well as a "killer app" consisting of an FPS (Japanese aren't too fond of FPS), and yet the reason the Japanese didn't buy it is xenophobia??
If you don't get why Japan is where the console wars will be won or lost, let me point it out to you. 99% of all successful console games in the past 20 years have been from Japan. The only exception I can think of is Halo -- and that was a PC game which had it's XBox port released a year before the PC version. Unless Microsoft can invade and make progress in Japan, they will NEVER make any headway in the console market. Period.
Do you have a reference, or are you just making assumptions?
Top 10 selling console games in the US for 2003:
1 MADDEN NFL 2004 PS2 ELECTRONIC ARTS
2 POKEMON RUBY GBA NINTENDO OF AMERICA
3 POKEMON SAPPHIRE GBA NINTENDO OF AMERICA
4 NEED SPEED: UNDERGROUND PS2 ELECTRONIC ARTS
5 ZELDA: THE WIND WAKER GCN NINTENDO OF AMERICA
6 GRAND THEFT AUTO: VICE PS2 ROCKSTAR GAMES
7 MARIO KART: DOUBLE GCN NINTENDO OF AMERICA
8 TONY HAWK UNDERGROUND PS2 ACTIVISION
9 ENTER THE MATRIX PS2 ATARI
10 MEDAL HONOR RISING PS2 ELECTRONIC ARTS
Source
6 of those 10 are from US developers. And since your other comment about the US console market being smaller than Japan's is provably false, I think it's safe to say these are reasonably "successful" games.
Sony is using a different CPU (Cell), and probably a different GPU, why doesn't the same argument apply to them?
Because they apparently will have "PS2-on-a-chip" to run PS2 games. You know, including backward compatibility without sacrificing current generation features.