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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.
'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?)
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!
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.
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??