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Getting All 1,700 Parts of the Xbox 360 to Market
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Microsoft is hoping its Xbox 360 will further the company's goal to 'link the Web and entertainment of all forms in consumers' living rooms,' the Wall Street Journal reports, but 'one manufacturing misstep -- a shortage of graphics chips or a recalled hard drive -- could derail those ambitions and drag Microsoft's unprofitable videogame business even deeper into the red.' The WSJ traces the 1,700 parts that go into the device through the supply chain -- from two southern China factories, Rotterdam, and on to Toledo, Memphis, and ultimately, retailers in the U.S. -- and looks at what could go wrong along the way."
Granted I havn't read TFA, but how is this any different from any other relatively complex peice of hardware? And why would it fsck up MS?
Actually this is an area that I hope M$ does well, for the same reason that I dislike their behavior in the OS market. If the Xbox does well and puts some pressure on Sony then hopefully features will be improved and prices driven down for both competitors.
Why would they expect failure now?
Microsoft *DOES* produce other devices and they know the manufacturing/shop floor management. (They run facilities and design the software that manages them)
I think MS knows what they're getting into.
But doesn't this hold true for all cutting-edge devices that rely on a single configuration to work? Dell to a degree are lucky because their inventory is built from off the shelf components which can be interchanged at short notice to give working product, but if you look at shortages of devices such as the Sony PSP, you find that there's a trade-off between time-to-market and component availability.
The upshot of this initial position is that over time the component costs come down, meaning a larger profit margin (or in the case of the X-box, a smaller loss), eventually leading to a machine redesign to minimise component count (look at the original Playstation configurations for examples of that), and eventually reducing the physical plastics cost my changing the form factor (PS and PS2).
Microsoft have chosen an interesting path with the 360; a combination of off-the-shelf components that are almost obsolete in retail channels such as the 20GB drive combined with unique items such as the processor and GPU. It's a neat strategy that reminds me of the way the Commodore Amiga was designed; custom chips for the guts of the machine supported by OTS components to keep costs down. It should be an interesting machine to watch, my only hope being that they aren't daft enough to supercede it too quickly.
A breathless journalist discovers that putting a product thru manufacturing requires coordination of lots of small parts, from many different vendors and countries. Journalist also learns that a screw-up in any of these parts will cause a PROBLEM!
Here is a newsflash for Journalists: The xbox is trivial to manufacture compared to other products. Go tour a plant making large Xerox machines, or a Toyota factory, if you want to see something which actually has a challange to it.
This article seems more like an ad for what is in reality a small, cheap, and disposable PC with some ductwork in it, a technology that was used on mainframes 20 years ago. This smells like an attempt to make people believe in "genius which is xbox"
I think there should be a new rule for journalists (and for school teachers as well): You are not allowed to write/teach about something technical (math, science, engineering) until you have spent time doing it professionaly. No more "how they build the widget" articles unless you are a manufacturing engineer with factory experience. Cut down of some of this fluff.
Bill must really think videogames are super-important; they keep losing billions, but Microsoft just keeps on going back for more punishment.
..... with their natural advantages in productivity software.
So you think the XBox is about games? Hell no. It is about control of the living room. It plays movies, tranfers music from a PC/Mp3 player, plays them, you can send messages to people and maybe even more. It runs a custom Windows 2000 kernel too, for the Power architecture.
It seems so odd that they'd use their monopoly on desktop productivity software to try to build a videogame empire: history says that
So what do you gauge from this? It means the real intent is to be the centre of our digital lifestyle. They make the hardware and the software. Like Apple. Does it get better than that??
The device is pretty cheap, compared to a computer yet more powerful than any out there. Someday MS might decide it can also be used to write emails, create Word documents, play games, and anything you might use a computer today. (And who knows, they might already have word running on it!)
I dare you to disagree!
Life is just a conviction.
Something that Basehead, or Alexander Brandon says is probably true. He has had his hand in the music, sound effects and voice acting for Deus Ex, Theif and Unreal. He was one of the most respected Americans in the Demo and tracking Scene, being almost as well known as Necros and Purple Motion. Considering his roots, I would have been suspicious if OP said they had talked to him anywhere other than IRC.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
"Even the the original XBox could be hacked into such a system, suggesting that MS deliberately crippled their new console."
If you want to do something with the 360 for which it wasn't designed, and if that something turns out not to work, then it isn't a matter of the device being "crippled."
You don't say your car is crippled when you drive it into a lake and find that it doesn't float quite as well as you were hoping. You just get out (if you can), walk up to shore, and say, "Hey - guess it's not one of those floaty car things."
- Rory [Microsoft Employee] | Free dirt: neopoleon.com
What is claimed here seems extremely unlikely for a number of reasons.
/.ers seem to think. They are well aware of the number of people with stereo-only setups, and would have no reason to alienate them.
t connected.htm that's the cable page for the 360. Notice that all the cables there have stereo anologue audio outputs (the red and white RCA cables). Why would they include stereo outputs, if the sound out was only monaural?
/. it's entirely possible.
1) When you have a hardwre sound processor, it's no more difficult to mix to 2 channels than to 1 or any other combination supported. You'll notice that cards like the Audigy can change speaker configuration on the fly with no problems. Thus it would make no sense to deliperatly handicap the system in this manner.
2) Microsoft is not stupid, contrary to what many
3) A quick look at Microsoft's site reveals stereo outputs on all the cables. Have a look at http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/accessories/ge
So I'm going to guess that orignal poster is wrong. I can see one of three situations as to why:
1) The person he was talking to was not who he believed it to be. The number of pretenders on IRC is beyond count. It is easily possible someone was lying about who they were, and had enough knowledge to make it seem feasable to the uninformed.
2) The composer may be misinformed. Being good at composing and tracking music does not make one a sound expert. He may well misunderstand the capabilityes of the X-box.
3) The orignal poster may be lying about the conversation. Given the anti-MS attitudes on
Now of course I haven't had hand on an Xbox 360 so I cannot confirm for certianty that there is stereo output available, but I have a hard time believing there isn't. It wouldn't make sense, and all evidence suggests there is.
Also, even in the extremely unlikely event it was lacking, stereo folks aren't out of luck. All recievers made any time receantly that I'm aware of will happily downconvert 5.1 to stereo if requested. On mine, I simply push the "stereo" button. It disengages all the surround speakers and sub, and mixes everything to the front left and right speakers. The source cab be 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 DD or DTS, it doesn't matter, it will make it stereo at the push of a button.
Either way I would say you should probably not believe something that some random guy claims that some other guy on IRC said.
That, and less is often more. Look at the iPod. Part of its success must be that Apple left out almost anything that wasn't directly involved in its primary function, playing music... the end result is that its a better music player, because you're not being confused by fifteen other buttons and all the features included to perform other functions, e.g. PDA, cell phone, digital camera.
So why restrict movie support on the device? Why can it play movies from DVD but not its own harddrive? Why must movies be streamed from another machine running Microsoft software? It makes no technical sense whatsoever. The only sense it makes is from a marketing perspective - a full-featured XBox 360 would have killed Windows Media Centre stone dead. After all, who is going to buy some crappy TV / PC hybrid to do what they can do with a regular TV and Xbox costing less? Thus the XBox 360 has been deliberately crippled with these artificial dependencies to ensure that both products have a future.
It is crippled, pure and simple. It could be a fully fledged media player, but Microsoft have chosen not to make it so for reasons that have nothing to do with what is best for the XBox.