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Ballmer Justifies 360's Costs
Next Generation follows up on news last week of the enormous financial burden the 360's launch has placed on Microsoft. CEO Steve Ballmer sent around an email discussing the company's bright outlook with the new console. From the article: "While Xbox 360 hardware itself is the most prominent area of videogame-related investment, Ballmer indicated that further development of Xbox Live is also integral to the success of the platform and its respective division, saying, "We must execute our Live strategy with speed and precision." Relatedly, Live's downtime yesterday has resulted in an underwhelming feature addition: messaging.
I think he understands that, your just missing the rule:
a. Speed
b. Precision
c. Low Cost
You can pick two but cannot have all three. From what they've been spending, it seems obvious they choose the first two. I more or less think they done a good job of it (except let me download from the marketplace in the background while I'm watching TV!!!!!) I use my 360 as a Media Center Extender to watch TV, movies, internet radio, etc, etc but the damn thing cannot yet begin a download from XBox live and keep that going in the background while I switch to the media center to watch TV! Really my only complaint, but VERY annoying.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
I had a 360 for about a week, took it back, and got a ps2 (for a specific game, plus some cash in the pocket). First of all, they did a great job with the dashboard, it looks slick and you can customize it. The achievements, gamerscore, and interaction with other gamers are genius. Geometry wars and burnout were some of the funnest I've had playing games ever. Downloading demos was genius as well, I had as much fun downloading and trying new games as I did playing ones I paid for.
So why did I take it back? Well, perhaps I wouldn't have if street fighter II was out already and Oblivion wasn't such a bugfest (and runs suprisingly slow at times for a 360 game). The machine is noticibly loud (I even took it back and got another and it was still loud). If I had an enclosed cabinet, this wouldn't have mattered as much. The future announced games didn't hold much interest to me. But the biggest factor was that the 360 sucks as a media center, and it couldn't replace my hacked xbox with Xbox Media Center. Lack of divx support and video only available to MS XP Media Center Edition killed it as a media center. My TV only has a couple componenet video inputs, so my decision was to keep the xbox and take back the 360.
What MS needs to do is quiet down the console (they are already taking steps towards this with a smaller chip), add divx support (and FLAC tag support, but that doesn't have as wide an appeal as divx), remove the "XP media center" lock-in for videos (they are taking steps towards this, but we will see what they actually do), improve the media features in general (better media player features), and add more games to xbox live (porting abandonware would be cheap and make a killer system IMO).