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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."
BZZT! Wrong. Honestly, if you don't know what you're talking about - why post?
MS could have easily sold the XBox for $50 as long as it was $50 [or the local currency equivalent] in all markets. Selling a product below cost is not dumping, idiot.
Here, read this and find out that you're completely wrong.
This is why I hate Slashdot. People are so interested in both gaming the system to gain karma and to try to sound smart that nonsense like the above gets posted. Please, don't post here anymore. You're obviously not trying to add anything to the actual discussion. If your self esteem is this poor, go see a shrink.
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.
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!