Slashdot Mirror
How IBM Out-foxed Intel With The Xbox 360
xcaverx writes "Learning from failure is a hallmark of the technology business. Nick Baker, a 37-year-old system architect at Microsoft, knows that well. A British transplant at the software giant's Silicon Valley campus, he went from failed project to failed project in his career. He worked on such dogs as Apple Computer's defunct video card business, 3DO's failed game consoles, a chip startup that screwed up a deal with Nintendo, the never successful WebTV and Microsoft's canceled Ultimate TV satellite TV recorder.
But Baker finally has a hot seller with the Xbox 360, Microsoft's video game console launched worldwide last holiday season."
Did he also work on the failed Xbox?
Seems curious to omit it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
IBM didn't outfox intel - by courting Microsoft, the lost Apple.
;-)
Apple may not count for a huge amount in sales, but the amount of hype Apple fan's created for PPC is worth more money then IBM has
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
successful X360 launch may be stretching it a bit neh?
I always chuckle when my company brings on someone that's been directly responsible (at the executive level) for busines decisions in other companies that have failed misserably. Often, they recite all their past experiences, and the only thing I can think of is "Why did we hire them, and how much are we spending?"
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I think the jury is still out on the success of the 360. This guy could be batting 1000.
...the never successful WebTV... But Baker finally has a hot seller with the Xbox 360, Microsoft's video game console launched worldwide last holiday season."
Shouldn't we wait until the 360 has outsold WebTV before we make that declaration?
maybe he works at www.reed-electronics.com now....
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Wow! With a record like that he was destined to work for Microsoft.
This guy's the limit!
Holy crap...all you Xbox employees better get your resumes ready!
Turning failures into successes since Windows 95. *laugh people*
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
this man has great karma!
What a successful resume... How the heck did he get hired at Microsoft? He was just a bad omen waiting to happen.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
"successful X360 launch may be stretching it a bit neh?"
The 360 still has the best games sold/console ratio in the history of games.
Their production output has finally hit a point where they can start keeping up demand well before the rival PS3 will hit shelves.
Xbox LIVE has been a monumental hit with more downloads/day than iTunes already.
Hard to say it wasn't a success.
Site apperas to be going down.
Mirror
All his failed projects remind me of this depressory: The only consistent feature of all your dissatisfying relationships is you.
And this should properly be followed by: How Intel outfoxed IBM with Apple
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
...is not all that matters. Come on, look at Microsoft, you should understand this by now. Market share **is** what matters. They established an amazing market share on their first round product, considering the market has been tied up by Nintendo and Sony for years and we hadn't seen anyone make a successful crack into it. They made a nice hole for the XBOX 360 to ease into, and they did it a good year+ before Nintendo or Sony will be able to make a response.
By the way I don't own and never have owned a console. I'm not a fanboy. Just taking an objective look at it from the outside. Microsoft couldn't care less about losing a few million/tens of million/even hundred million on the first run of XBOX. They were cracking a market and setting up for the second and third generation. And they did well.
I am inspired- inspired!- by this man's ability to keep his chin up through it all, shoulder all the adversity, and successfully move from a series of abysmal failures to merely a catastrophic failure!
My hat, sir, is off to you!
Microsoft went with IBM because they didn't want to get embarrassed by Sony and Nintendo with the uncompetitive chips from Intel and AMD.
A very senior engineer at NVidia I know is talking more and more about how they see Intel and AMD's x86 chips as dead weight dragging them down and how they would like to make x86 irrelevant by moving all application and OS functionality onto their boards.
The winners ended up being:
IBM
Sony
Nintendo
Microsoft
And the losers ended up being:
Intel - The big loser in all of this
AMD - Less so
Apple - Once IBM won all three console contracts they decided Apple was no longer worth the hassle for only 4% of their chips sales - buh bye!
If you love sitting around playing with SPEC and Intel's marketing compiler or hangout at aceshardware or other x86 fanboy sites you probably see things differently. Heh.
But the fact that a company sees there is a viable market for another 2-300 performance add on for x86 gaming systems in the PhysX boards should be as clear an indication as anyone needs to how far x86 is falling behind.
... getting to market a year+ before your competition, selling your devices as quickly as you can produce them, considering that Microsoft is only on their second generation device whereas Sony is on their third (not to count portable devices) and Nintendo is on... uh... fifth? Microsoft is doing well. They cracked a market.
Why are we treating the processors like they are equal? Clearly a risc arch. is a better design for what they are doing on graphics world today. Dev tools are certainly a factor, but multi cores on sisc arch blow chunks compared to the segmenting ability of risc design. Am I missing something here??
Or, you have the recent American Illness of demanding immediate returns with no thoughts toward long-term performance. I call it Stockholder Syndrome.
Wait till the XBox 360 comes out and see what happens. I may be wrong, but I think they will turn a profit and get even more marketshare. Then the third iteration will put them even with Sony and Nintendo.
Disclaimer: I own a Sega Dreamcast and a Nintendo GameCube.
Blar.
Geez this Baker guy sounds like the kiss of death.
Cripes.
Larry Yang-all dictated what Microsoft needed this time around.
They couldn't be late. They had to make hardware that could become much cheaper over time and had to pack as much performance into a game console as they could without overheating the box.
"Unfortunately, Larry Yang did not explicitly forbid overheating the power supply"
Not outside the US. In Europe and Japan it's sales are very poor. From this side of the Altlantic, it looks like Nick Baker has joined another doomed project..
Learning from failure is easy. The tough part is learning from success. When a project succeeds, there's no pressure to make searching analyses of the reasons for success. The upper-level managers involved begin to think they're innately cool and have all the answers... the success of their product line proves it.
Think Netscape... think Digital Equipment Corporation (I date their decline from the day when a salesperson apologized for being slow to return a call but added "After all, we're a billion dollar corporation." Think Ashton-Tate. Think Quark...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Nick Baker == t3h 5ux0r5
I came to this post expecting to read something about IBM and Intel and XBOX 360s. The blurb makes mention only of the XBOX 360. Maybe it's in TFA, if I could read it. Poorly done Slashdust, poorly done.
Blame his management for his failures. He was probably subordinate to many in key decisions. I would praise his for going after such diverse and technically challenging projects as he has.
What's the alternative? He slept with the right people? Come on. Each of his "failures" has been really high profile for each of the company's he's worked with. I think it's shortsighted to simply blame him.
From the article:
.. the only thing I could think of was: made critical decisions == compromise quality. Hahahahaha. We all know the production problems and quality problems the 360 had / is having.
The team labored for years and made critical decisions that enabled Microsoft to beat Sony and Nintendo to market with a new box, despite a late start with the Xbox in the previous product cycle.
When I read that
I love spin!
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
There were numerous things that went wrong with the launch such as supply problems, issues with over heating and game crashes. Some suggested that these problems were indicative of a premature launch. It woudl say that launching without an HD disk solution and offering an addon later on was an unfortunate decision and indicated that they released it before it was really ready.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
... they would shut down the factories and stop manufacturing them. Fact is they have a game plan, fact is they are still flying off the shelves, fact is they are gaining market share... that's all that matters. People with consoles buy games. The more colsoles you have out there the more games you potentially sell. You have to spend money to make money.
this article states Microsoft expects to make money in 2007. Also note that all figures on how much microsoft is "actually losing" is speculation by industry analysts. No one actually knows precisely how much Microsoft is paying for what component.
If you want to crack a market you have to pull out the checkbook and take a hit. You can't go in timid. Microsoft has shown that and look at the market share they have gained. They have a good percentage of gamers hooked, now on the third generation consoles they don't have to take as big a hit on the console price.
"Often, they recite all their past experiences, and the only thing I can think of is "Why did we hire them, and how much are we spending?""
Of course. As everyone knows, successful people never fail.
I have bought two consoles in the last six months. I tend to use a PC for gaming.
I got a Gamecube for my wife for Christmas. I was shocked. The games on it are really fun.
I then got a PS2 so I could play Tourist Trophy. It is pretty nice, I have gotten a few more games for the PS2 and for the GameCube since then. From what I can see the GameCube games are more fun. The PS2 games are better simulations. I thought about picking up an XBox360 but why? None of the games seem that great and it is really expensive.
I might get one after they have been out for a while and the price has come down, if they have any games I just must have.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Couldn't you also read Nick Baker's track record as proof positive the XBOX 360 will fail? That is an impressive list of failures and I don't want the XBOX 360 to ruin his average. Real quick question: is this guy old? Did he perhaps work on the design team for the titanic, too?
1.) not understand the whole "monthly fee" part of it and return it or
2.) Get confused anyway, and return it.
We had stacks, and stacks, and stacks of unsellable returned Web TV's that no one wanted. If Web TV shipped a million units, I'd be amazed if more than half actually stayed in homes once purchased.But Baker finally has a hot seller with the Xbox 360, Microsoft's video game console launched worldwide last holiday season.
Yeah... right...
OK... I'll bite.
What _are_ his successes?
He worked on such dogs as Apple Computer's defunct video card business, 3DO's failed game consoles, a chip startup that screwed up a deal with Nintendo, the never successful WebTV and Microsoft's canceled Ultimate TV satellite TV recorder.
What I want to know is how he keeps getting job offers. Seriously - I haven't had 1/100th this much opportunity in my whole entire life.
How the hell does this guy keep landing these?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I just had to say thank you for using irrespective. Too many people will use the non-word "irregardless" instead.
The IBM PowerPC is chasing the embedded device market which in terms of unit volume (and profit) is much larger than the entire Apple computer market. The gaming console market is well suited for an embedded device as are automobiles. Designing custom chips for Apple, for what I assume is a difficult customer, is not necessary a profitable venture.
The unit numbers shouldn't matter from a success standpoint, should they? From Wikipedia:
Businessweek magazine compiled a report[1] that estimates the total cost of components in the "premium" bundle at $525 USD, sans manufacturing costs, meaning that Microsoft is losing money on every Xbox 360 system sold. It should be noted that the strategy of selling a console at a loss or near-loss is common in the console games industry, as console makers can usually expect to make up the loss through game licensing.
The console numbers that MS releases are marketing fluff to get developers hot and happy to write games for the Xbox360. The real numbers that need to be looked at to determine if this thing is a success is in numbers of games sold, and the directly related return on investment selling licensing to cover that loss.
They could sell a billion of them, but if nobody buys any games for them - the platform would financially be an epic failure.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"He worked on such dogs as Apple Computer's defunct video card business, 3DO's failed game consoles, a chip startup that screwed up a deal with Nintendo, the never successful WebTV and Microsoft's canceled Ultimate TV satellite TV recorder." Generally a record like this indicates an aptitude in government.
"I have neither the wit, nor words, nor worth to stir mens blood, I speak only right on". Billy Shakespeare
"MS is in dire need of a Halo for the 360 to sell on"
But they will; they're saving that for when the PS3 launches.
They learned this trick from Sony, who launched Final Fantasy VIII on the day the Dreamcast launched to take the shine off Sega.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
And don't forget this: http://www.joystiq.com/2006/04/28/3-2-million-xbox -360s-sold-388-million-in-operating-losses/
"Microsoft's Home and Entertainment segment, which includes the Xbox division, posted a $213 million quarterly operating loss, bringing its total losses to $388 million."
The SHIPPED numbers seem ok though.
Perhaps they might actually make some money back once they start selling more of those $60 games.
...in all your life's failures is you.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
... getting to market a year+ before the market is ready to buy, not being able to make devices quickly enough to meet even small levels of demand, moving yourself into a position where six months into your second attempt at market one of your competitors has five successful consoles, one of your competitors has three successful consoles, and you have none...
This is the single dumbest thing ever said by an Apple fanboy, it belongs in the fanboy hall of fame.
This is the truth. Rags-to-riches is mostly a myth. In fact, if you want into the club, you pretty much have to sell out. You need to prove to them that you are just like them or they won't let you play. And once you are in, you are set for life. The one no-no is getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar, because the myth is that these guys are all fine upstanding citizens who would never do that. So you will get a slap on the wrist if you get caught in some kind of malfeasance, just to prove to the plebes that white collar crime is an aberation performed by a few bad apples, rather than a standard operating procedure. But they will never kick you out of the club just for screwing over the common citizen. That's pretty much what you have to do to prove you are one of them.
You know what makes me sick? That so many otherwise decent Americans aspire to be just like these sociopaths.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Network Mirror content is here. I was also able to get the original article by trimming back the cited URL:6 328378
http://www.reed-electronics.com/eb-mag/article/CA
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
The psx and the ps2 have outsold the xbox and the 360 by a large margin (in similar time periods) and the ps3 probably will too. If the 360 even sells half as much as the ps2 does at the end of it's life i'll be goddamn surprised.
Hmmm... Pie...
I'd say, "How Intel outfoxed IBM, Apple, SGI, Compaq, HP, Dell and DEC. " This old story gets more true every day.
Apple's wrists are slit. Give it a year or so and Intel will extinguish them for their old palls in Redmond.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Uh, Dreamcast matched what the 360 has done thusfar but with a much smaller marketting budget. The ps2 sold much more in it's first 5 months then the 360 has and the psx was monstrously successful (took the number one spot easily--don't remember but it sold at least 3x as much as the saturn and the 64).
I'm not sure how the 360 is as success as you make it out to be.
Hmmm... Pie...
When they say 3e6 shipped, do they mean shipped to customers, or shipped to retailers. A common ploy of a powerful supplier is to "stuff the channel" with units, so that you can claim "shipped" on your revenue/marketing goals. If the units don't sell well, it also means that your retailers are holding the bag, and it also doesn't bode well for the next quarter.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Remember the ps2 is only sony's second gaming console and second major success. It's like saying the psone was a success if it only sold 20 million consoles then the 80-100million it really sold because it was their first console and they broke the completely nintendo-sega dominance.
Hmmm... Pie...
OK, now that I am in my 30s and I have no clue what is going on in the gaming world, I have a simple question. Should I buy an XBox 360 or is the Playstation 3 going to blow it away? I don't really want two systems, so if the Playstation is going to be vastly more popular, superior, or have a better game selection, I'd rather have that. I would have bought the Xbox 6 months ago, but it wasn't available. Now the playstation will be out soon enough that I am willing to wait. Thanks!
While everybody is saying sony is loosing this much and microsoft is loosing this much Nintendo is smiling away. No matter how few consoles they sell they stil lseem to make money. Remember the gamecube sold about the same amount of consoles world wide as the xbox did. They also made money off the gamecube. Everybody knows what the wii is now. yes its a bad name but awesome amrketing tool. While everybody is saying sony this or microsoft that , Nintendo is going to go up and leave sony and microsoft wondering what happened. Just loo kat the ds. Everybody thought the psp would masacre the ds. Keep in mind the chips inside the rev should make ibm a lot of money. its an old chip that needed few enhancements.
Yeah, for sure dude. Xbox360 is just smoking off the shelves. I notice that everytime I wander by the display in the local cd book palace and see one snot nosed kid half interested in playing it. Its a BIG seller, you betcha!
Considering how much Microsoft is losing on each box sold, Microsoft's strategy is clearly to sell as few actual XBox 360s as possible while preserving the impression of a successful launch. They've been fairly successful at this. Demand clearly greatly exceeded supply over Christmas--hardly surprising considering that a number of retailers told me that they'd only received 2 or 3 units. Indeed, it was late Feb. before stores around here had units for people who had not been on their waiting lists since early Fall or before.
That being said, I've got one, and am enjoying it, although the game that I'm playing most is Robotron (which seems to run perfectly, just as it did on the Playstation 1).
Nice to see the XBox doomsayers are still hanging around Slashdot.
All the 360 flames would be a lot more compelling if they weren't coming from people who already hate Microsoft. If Redmond came out with a motor that ran on water and gave the cars away for free, I would fully expect a series of comments about how the interior only comes in three colors and there are too few cup holders.
Slashdot should just refrain from posting anything about the 360 - this forum is so heavily biased against any Microsoft product that Slashdot readers will find any reason they can to pick it apart.
The irony is how worshipful XBox haters are towards the Playstation - a product of an equally evil corporation that also wants to take over the galaxy. But they're not after Linux at the moment, so I guess that makes Sony Ok.
Is that you?
room full of people who have no Idea what they're talking about
1) is it their or they're?
2) Does SOL = Shit out of luck or statue of limitations?
I am reminded of the South Park episode where the local boys are playing baseball but want to lose because they don't want to play anymore because they find the game ruthlessly boring. Unfortunately for them all the other teams also want to lose for the same reason, and South Park keeps winning games and ends up having to play all summer to the delight of the parents, but not to the kids.
Stockholders = parents. Kids = Intel. A contract with Microsoft sounds great for a company, until you start reading into it. By the way that Microsoft does things, if the xbox 360 flops at any point Microsoft would be protected from losing capita by Intel and other contracted companies. The way they do it is that say they estimate 5M units to be sold in X time, they order that many units. If only 1M sells and they don't think they can sell the rest, by their contracts they do not have to, the contractors have to keep the parts that MS didn't sell and sell it themselves or take it as a loss. So if Intel took up the task and the 360 undersold (a very real worry if I was Intel), they would be at a loss of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, while Microsoft would shrug it off and make an xbox 720 or something. Intel put the numbers in a calculator with some estimate of probability, and it came up sour. Microsoft wasn't willing to budge. To the best of my knowledge, this is what happened.
Signing a contract with Microsoft is like arguing on the Internet....
Let's see...
Is it just me, or does this guy sound like the Ted McGinley of the tech industry?
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
I bet that 4% is the number of chips sold to Apple not 4% of the revenue: IBM is making also micro-controllers PPC which are much cheaper than PPC used by Apple so they bring less revenue by chip.
Of course IBM people use the figure which advantaged them more, but you're not obliged to be naive..
As for the NVidia guy, GPU are great for some usage, they *suck* mighty balls for other usage: they don't even have a 64-bit FPUs (in some case this might be worked around to compute a full precision result but it's not simple), GPUs are awful for single-threaded or branchy codes, etc.. Sure an Nvidia guy would like to have everything running on GPUs, but what do you expect?
As for the PhysX boards, yes specialised solution works better for specialised needs than general purpose solution, so what?
You're comparing apples and oranges.
"Larry, in this company you will OBEY the second law of thermodynamics!"
--via BSD fortune
They're waiting for Sony to commit first to a date. Then they'll commit to a release date for "Halo 360".
They lost 3 major chip contracts in the biggest game in town. Nintendo, Sony and MS are going to sell a lot more high performance chips than Dell in the next 5 years. Consumer PCs are cheaper and cheaper every year and Intel has to compete with AMD.
So, to review: AMD is cutting into Intel's margins, PCs are getting cheaper by the day, Vista hasn't come out yet to goose PC sales, and every console in on PowerPC chips. Cell phones still don't have Intel inside. Nvidia is taking money from Intel's biggest PC game fans.
Something tells me that Intel was the desperate one in the Apple/Intel hookup. Apple didn't even go with Intel's custom chips, so now they can leave for AMD when they want to. I think Intel is really desperate to sell high end chips, which Apple does better than anyone.
What you need to do is earn enough to be able to afford to stay in business. For console companies that means making enough to fund research for the next generation.
Has Nintendo done that?
Fact. The Wii is NOT going to compete with the PS3 and 360 on hardware (has anyone mentioned yet that for all the sillyness of the name Wii is has the same 3 letter width and that it fits far better in game sites menu's then Revolution?).
Nintendo says they choose not too. Well fair enough but is it true. Can it be they cannot afford to add the same level of hardware as their competitors?
They are gambling that not enough people will have HDTV to object to the Wii not having HDTV output. This generation that might work. The next?
It don't matter to MS if they turn a profit or not on the console. They will be able to spend billions again and again and again. Sony is less capable but it still was able this time to come up with the money.
No just because it is less powerfull doesn't mean that the Wii is going to loose. It doesn't exactly give it a headstart either. Price may do so BUT if they sell only as many as the gamecube then not only won't they have the money to compete next time BUT 3rd party developers will be even less likely to bother.
Real world economy is more complex then simply selling your console at a profit.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Xbox is losing massive amounts of money so I would not say that this person is finally getting it right. The first gen Xbox never made any money either and since Microsoft has a long long history of losing money on many many long running projects, his only hope can be that he's paid a good salary.
Did you know that Microsoft dumped over $1 billion in losses on the Windows CE operating system to keep Palm from "growing" up from a lowly handheld OS vendor?
Well, Microsoft is also willing to lose billions on the Xbox to keep Sony's PlayStation from growing from a console into a media room PC and eventually taking share from Microsofts desktop OS monoply. So, good move for jumping on the Microsoft gravy train but don't think for a minute that the product exists because "the market" accepted it. In a real competitive market, projects like Window CE and most likely the Xbox, would be dead after 5 years of 10's to 100's of millions in losses. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
http://cbs.sportsline.com/games/story/9342046
exclusively on Xbox 360.
Apple sells 5-8 million macs a quarter.
As another poster pointed out, you're waaaay off on this number. According to cnet Apple sold 1.25 million Macs in the quarter ending December 31st.
AccountKiller
The XBox360 isn't a success until they turn a profit from it. Period. The first XBox was their mindshare gaining "beachhead." If this one doesn't make any money either, it's a failure.
General Purpose complex CPU is slower than Single Purpose parallel CPU at the operations the Single Purpose CPU is designed for!!! Film at 11
I mean are you fucking kidding me? Banias, Dothan, and Sledgehammer do the GPP thing just fine at the same power/performance level as PPC or USPARCIV.
Of course NVidia would love to be put out their own CPU. Because then they could control THE WHOLE SOLUTION! CPU, chipset, video and sound! All they'd need is a HD manufacturer to partner with...
It's not the x86 dragging them down, its having to make their chips compatiable with the products of the rest of the industry. Big friggin deal... welcome to the modern tech marketplace.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
hot seller? where? from what i understand its doing miserable worldwide, but it looks like it is doing well because of unit shortages.
>>Sig under construction
Also, a marginal cost of $800 per unit, even if they purchase ALL the parts from outside vendors seems awfully high considering what that $800 will be able to buy *retail* when the PS3 comes out.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
1. There are those that are waiting to compare the 360 to the PS3 before they buy their next-gen console. If when the PS3 is released it doesn't live up to the hype, those people will make the investment in the 360, with more piece of mind that there's nothing better coming just around the corner.
2. If the (as yet unspecified) price of the PS3 is ridiculously high compared to the 360, some people who were waiting for the PS3 might just say "fuck it, I'll get the 360 and six games for the price of the PS3 which is only marginally better".
This is all conjecture as we all don't know whether the PS3 will blow the 360 out of the water or just on paper and just how much the price differential will be.
Not true. That statement about Halo 3 launching at the same time as the PS3 was either made up by Times Magazine or Bill Gates has very short memory. http://gamesnews.yahoo.com/newsarticle?eid=431186& page=0
http://www.joystiq.com/2005/08/23/halo-3-delayed-u ntil-2007-to-launch-alongside-movie/
http://news.spong.com/article/9572?cb=148