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Why Microsoft Got Into the Console Business
An anonymous reader writes "Joachim Kempin, former vice president of Windows Sales, has explained how the original Xbox came to be. It turns out it was Sony's fault, simply because the Japanese company wasn't very friendly towards Microsoft, and Microsoft eventually decided they had to 'stop Sony.' Apparently, long before the Xbox was even an idea, Microsoft was trying to collaborate with Sony in a number of areas they thought there was overlap. That collaboration was sought before even Sony had a games console coming to market, and would have focused on products for the entertainment sector."
About Bill Gates throwing a fit in front of Sony because they refused to put his garbage software on their hardware. Also not that while Xbox is profitable for Microsoft, it is not considered profitable enough.
It was pretty well agreed eight years ago that the living room was a possible avenue for a "Trojan Horse" that would take over as the household computing center and push aside the consumer PC. And Bill Gates was always paranoid about competition, not just established players in personal computing like Apple but also new entrants large and small. That's why MS got into so much trouble with the anti-trust regulators in the '90s. Sony didn't want to make some sweetheart development deal with MS... so what? Sony was big and powerful, and some of the last companies that made the mistake of trying to buddy up to Microsoft were IBM (with the original PC) and Sybase (with SQL Server development for Windows). Jerry Kaplan wrote about his own close encounter with Bill Gates in his book "Startup" (Kaplan demo'd the Go tablet computer for Gates and Jeff Raikes, hoping to interest them in application development; instead, Gates turned around and launched the Pen Windows project. Guess who was put in charge? Yup. Jeff Raikes).
As usual, Steve Jobs got it right... the game console wasn't going to be the centerpiece for consumer technology. It looks so obvious in retrospect.
Reasons to get into business #32:
Spite.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Thats hilarious, because the playstation originally came about from sony and nintendo trying to partner up, and nintendo breaking the deal because of arguments about money. Sony was so mad they created the playstation to rival nintendo.
As a long time user of linux, I have to say that I also enjoy Windows for the moments when it is appropriate. Same for OS X. There 3 amazing accomplishments of the human mind. And should be celebrated as such.
I think Sony made the right decision there. If Microsoft approached me about "co-operating" I wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole. Look how well it worked out for IBM (with MS-DOS and OS/2) or Sun (with Java).
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Unfortunately, that's also the reasonining behind a number of open source projects.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Given MS's strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, it's obvious Sony made the right choice.
In all honesty, why would any hardware vendor want to tie themselves to a platform over which they have no control? Look at how MS throws around their desktop hardware partners, dictating to them which minimum and maximum hardware requirements the system can have. No doubt they would try to pull the same shenanigans with Sony. And then look at how MS blames its hardware partners for crappy Win8 sales when it's really fault for designing the OS in ways that no consumer ever wanted? And then there's the atrocity that's Windows RT, and how nothing runs on it!! I'm guessing that there isn't a single hardware vendor on the planet that wouldn't love to never have to deal with MS again, were it not for their desktop monopoly... probably even MS itself!
It's not unreasonable that Sony executives made the simple observation: companies that entangle with MS never do well. Seriously - for each and every company that MS has partnered with that's doing decently, you can name 5 that are in the gutter or dead altogether.
At least MS did a better job with the Xbox than they did with WinMo. That's not saying much, but hey, when you're Microsoft, that's really all you've got...
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
... because Nintendo screwed them. Nintendo and Sony were jointly developing the CD add-on to the SNES (with Sony also building a combined SNES/CD machine named the Play Station). However, Nintendo dropped a bombshell on Sony at the '91 CES: they were severing their ties with Sony and instead partnering with Phillips to develop their CD technology.
Well, they could've coexisted with the Xbox if the play station 3 didn't cost 599 at launch. Well, there's also the argument that the SDK could've been better, but I tend to think of developers as whiny. Not to mention spoiled considering the Xbox tool chain was directx and the windows kernel running on PowerPC.
Still. The idiocy of Sony wasn't spitting in Billy G's face, it was fucking up the ps3
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Xbox sucks. One must own a Gold membership (about $5/month) to install many key applications, such as Netflix (for which a paid Netflix subscription is required, of course). And whenever an update is available, refusing to install it immediately will close the Live session, preventing any access to Netflix. This is hugely annoying as those pesky updates frequently happen at the least convenient time.
They really do milk the customers. I bought a 1-year Gold membership but I probably won't renew. Unfortunately the alternative (Playstation) is not that great.
lucm, indeed.
I always thought it was because Sega failed with the Dreamcast. Sega had worked with Microsoft for 2 years for the OS on the Dreamcast. So I assumed Microsoft decided to go on their own with out Sega.
On the other hand, Nintendo made its own worst enemy by dropping out of the "Play Station" (with a space) partnership with Sony to make a CD-ROM drive. The Play Station would have plugged into the clock port on the bottom of the Super NES using the HANDS protocol (Nintendo's version of Blast Processing). The trouble is that HANDS couldn't copy information directly into video memory; instead, it had to be bounced off the CPU's memory, and that couldn't be done full-screen at a solid 30 fps. So Nintendo dumped Sony for Philips CD-i, and Sony began the PS-X (PlayStation Experiment) project to rework what it had left into a stand-alone console.
In the Harry Potter universe, on the other hand, it might be the case that the Play Station accessory for Super NES came out on schedule, which explains Dudley Dursley having a Play Station in mid-1994 rather than the real-world release date of the late third quarter of 1995.
I know there are a lot that will disagree, but I honestly feel that MS has at least "mostly" learned their lesson. Sony? leaks customer data like there's no tomorrow. DMCA? Bastards fought tooth and nail for it, then have wantonly violated it with rootkits to "protect" their music CDs. Where's the public outcry on that? Where's anonymous? I could go on, but, I think these very few points suffice. Feel free to add on or disagree.
Call it spite, if you like.
If millions of users need an app, or a functionality, that is only available at prices up to ten thousand dollars per seat - you can expect an open source alternative to spring up, sooner or later.
Yeah, call it spite. Or, you could say, "It's the economy, stupid!"
If it can be demonstrated that people can teach an animal to roll over and play dead, should everyone in the world who wishes to do so have to pay ten, fifty, or maybe a thousand dollars to the guy who figured out how to do so?
I say no.
In the case of Microsoft, they taught computers how to blue screen and play dead. I'm not willing to pay for that privilege, thank you very much. Ditto with Autocad, Dragon Naturally Speaking, and the hundreds of other useful things that a person can do with a computer. My computer serves ME, not some faceless corporation amassing unmeasurable fortunes in offshore accounts.
Open source for the win!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"Cooperate with us or we will crush you". Geez I wonder why Sony would ever give such a cold shoulder to such a friendly gesture?
Like Microsoft operatives infiltrated SONY at all levels of management and sent the company crashing into the ground? I think that'd be funny.
Of course, if Microsoft were competent enough to do that...
Considering what they've done to Nokia, they definitely seem capable of doing just that.
It's true, and I think it first really hit home with most people when Business Insider posted their "Microsoft Operating Profit By Division" chart about 3 years ago. Since then the XBox group has had some profitable quarters and some losses (a big one last spring), but is still down a couple billion. If you're "genuinely interested" in the exact amount, just open Excel and type in the numbers from all of Microsoft's quarterly reports for the last decade to get an exact amount-- the numbers aren't secret.
E pluribus unum
There's a third E in that but I don't remember what it stands for...
I believe the word, as used by Microsoft France, is "enculer".
To be clear, that chart lists "Entertainment and Devices" division, of which Xbox is but one product, the others being Windows Phone, Surface, all MS Hardware, and other things. So it's not quite as easy as saying "xbox is losing money for MS" unless you can actually break that out of the rest of the division.
As described in the book "opening the xbox", it worked on Bill Gates nerves that sony was to powerfull in the living room and it could use its weight to influence what became new standards in the living room. Look at the DVD for example how the ps2 accelerated the adoption of this format. Microsoft dream is about Microsoft everywhere
The same thing happend with blu ray that totally destroyed microsoft hd dvd push. The xbox never has been about gaming and I'm even sure that for the next xbox the focus will be also bigger on non gaming capabilities.
The irony of the whole thing is that the xbox seriously weakend their windows platform as it weakened the argument "I need windows because I want to game"
Did I mention graphics? I said SDK. A lot of developers have been bitching about the ps3's SDK. Even if the games look great, that doesn't mean the SDK doesn't suck.
But I'm willing to err on the side of Sony here because the notion that developers are whiny and spoiled is more attractive to me.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
And you could say that Valve is getting into the console gaming business with Steam Box because of Microsoft (although blaming that entirely on Microsoft is questionable and ignores other variables, but the point is there on a surface level). History repeats itself indeed.
There was an April, 2007 article written by analyst Roger Ehrenberg called "When Will Microsoft Own Up To The Xbox 360 Bomb?". Essentially, he ran the numbers for the divisions of Microsoft where they'd stuffed their console business, and determine they'd invested over $21 billion (at that time) in the console business, and had earned a whopping $5.4 billion of cumulative operating losses in return. That didn't fully account for the Red Ring Of Death either, which apparently cost them another $1 - $5 billion.
They have had profitable quarters since then, but as far as I know they haven't come anywhere close to earning $26-$30 billion just in order to break even on their investment in the console business.
Consoles have been a money pit for Microsoft.
Worse, in order to remain competitive with Nintendo and Sony, they're going to have to sink billions more into the next-generation of consoles if they want to stay in that business (and pride pretty much dictates they have to stay in that business).
It's likely they'll never break even on their investment. They may have blocked Sony or Nintendo from becoming the de facto home entertainment hub, but it isn't clear to me that keeping their options open in that space has been worth close to $30 billion. There's also the considerable threat that Apple will waltz into that space with a compelling new offering and blow most everybody else out of contention (while spending far less than $30 billion to do it). Google and Amazon are disruptive threats as well in that space.
Ironically, Apple spent far, far less than $30 billion developing the iPod, iPhone and iPad, combined - a combo that's proven a money machine for Cupertino almost since the day the products were released into the market. Each one of those products could have come from Microsoft - they were certainly years ahead of Apple at one point when it came to smart phones and tablets. Redmond took their eye off of that space while chasing the console business, a decision which I think will go down as one of the biggest misallocations of resources any corporation ever made.
And Giant Enemy Crabs. Oh, and you gotta love that real-time weapon change enabled only by the power of the PS3. RIIIIDGEE RACER!!! Only five hundred ninety-nine U.S. dollars.
Funny, Gabe himself considers Apple a bigger threat to the upcoming Steambox than either Microsoft or Sony.
But even so you may be half right, Valve will probably be a threat to Sony and MS as well.
Linux, bittorrent, tcp/ip, html are just a few examples that have nothing to do with corporations in their inception.
Inception != Success. And do not underestimate the contributions of big corporations to open source. The original premise is not without merit. Big corporations have been instrumental in the success of most if not all major open source projects. The only way you can claim that big companies have nothing to do with these technologies is if you are willfully blind to the facts. Just because the big companies are not always the ones that start these projects doesn't mean they aren't important to the success of the projects.
Linux was started as a project by one guy but have no illusions that it would have gotten where it is without the help of big corporations and the talent they possess. Need proof? How about pretty much every major tech company including Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Novell, Microsoft (yes Microsoft), Texas Instruments, AMD, Oracle, Nokia, Google, Samsung, and a whole bunch more having made significant contributions to the linux source code.
HTML was started at CERN which is a pretty big organization (effectively a non-profit company) and would not have gotten to where it is without the help of countless companies. TCP/IP was heavily influenced by Xerox PARC as well as IBM, AT&T and DEC not to mention DARPA. AT&T developed the TCP/IP stack for unix and put it into the public domain.
there never was such a thing as "Blast Processing."
As far as I can tell, "Blast Processing" was Sega's marketing spin for the DMA unit in the Genesis, which allowed large copies to video memory without the CPU overhead of a software memcpy. The Super NES had a DMA unit of similar capability, just not marketed as such.
Fast scrolling just means you update your horizontal position by larger increments
Fast scrolling also means you need to copy the newly visible part of the map into video memory. Without DMA, there's a practical speed limit on this aspect of scrolling. DMA makes the copy so fast that a whole screen's worth of tile indices can in theory be updated at a solid 60 fps on both the Genesis and Super NES. That works well for platformers and other games using a tiled background plane, but full-motion video needs a whole screen's worth of pixels copied, which takes a lot more video memory bandwidth.
The greater challenge would be architecting the game or app to make use of the cells in an optimal way and to move as much logic as possible into them to free up the CPU for other tasks. I expect cross platform games have it even harder since they have two opposing goals - to make the game work optimally across platforms and to share as much code as possible. Wouldn't be surprised if some of them have developed a higher level language which allows the logic to be expressed once and transformed to the equivalent code for use on 360 or PS3.
its not really goofy-ass architecture, just different.
It has been dissected here time and again by games developers just how it's goofy.
In a way, you can blame MS for thinking its goofy-ass because (like Windows) we're all conditioned to think everything must work in only 1 way.
I have no love for DirectX, but MS arguably did things the more "right" way, in that their way is less of a pain in the ass.
You might not remember old style computers that had separate chips for sub functions, like the Amiga that kicked ass because it had a CPU with several discrete support chips for sound and video.
I own an A1200 and have owned A500, 2000, 2500, and 3000.
The PS3 is just much more of the same.
No, it certainly is not. That is a specious comparison. If you are actually familiar with the Amiga then you know that is pure bullshit. The Amiga was similar to game consoles in that it had unified memory, except hilariously the PS3 doesn't have unified memory, and the Xbox 360 does. But it was also very like modern PCs in that it had hardware to do the heavy lifting and free the CPU to perform computing tasks instead of doing so much shoveling.
The Amiga was completely cool, don't get me wrong. At the time, having a bunch of chips floating around the CPU doing DMA was a big deal. Today, we all have that, and PCs with unified memory are a dime a dozen. Even tablets have this, even though the various chips are on a single chip; the graphics are handled by a separate core! The Amiga was groundbreaking, but its legacy is not gone, it is everywhere. It is not, however, in the PS3. The PS3 has a wacky CPU, where the Amiga used a bog-standard COTS 68k CPU. That meant that you could re-use code written for other platforms, like the Atari ST, and then you could utilize the custom chips to make the software better. The PS3 has separate graphics and main memory, where the 360 permits you to partition it, as the Amiga did. The Amiga did have CHIP and FAST memory, but base (unexpanded) Amigas didn't actually have any FAST RAM, so most games didn't account for it anyway. It was more common for games to require 1MB CHIP than to require 1MB RAM generally, and then you needed a fatter Agnus or a later machine.
Now the crappy SDK probably didn't help matters at all. They should learn from that when they do the next console.
The PS3 suggests that Sony has a hard time learning. The Playstation dominated the Saturn in part because of developer acceptance. The Saturn was compared by one developer to a pile of chips on a board. The Playstation had a relatively elegant SDK and hardware for transparency, so it was much easier to make games for. Then instead of using MIPS cores relatively unadulterated Sony stuck them together with baling wire and glue to make the PS2's processor. And that made developers angry, and then they made an even wackier architecture for the PS3. But rumors suggest that the new machine will be using a fairly standard multicore CPU, so perhaps they will also unfuck the SDK.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The very first Electronic Entertainment Expo, held in LA (at the Staples Center if I recall correctly), had the Sony and Microsoft booths next to one another. (MS, if I recall was squeezed between Sony and Sega) Sony's was HUGE, as they were at the time, pushing the Playstation (which wasn't even out in the USA yet, but had been released in Japan). Sega had already released the Sega Saturn and was pushing some 3-D dragon game (forgot the name).
MS's booth, was not so big, they were showing flight simulator and a few other entertainment packages for the PC. MS, used to being the biggest player at any PC/computer show, was not used to being dwarfed by the behemoths of Sony, Sega, and Nintendo.
When Sony ran an entire Marching Band through MS's booth (and around the entire show), I think MS had had enough and decided then and there to get into the Console Biz.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Apparently it was successful everywhere but the US.
Probably because of the video game crash of '82. The crash missed Japan and Europe, so 8-bit stuff hung on longer there, but MSX came out in '83, post-dating both the IBM PC and the C-64. The US was tired of 8-bit 64K toys, and certainly didn't need to import the equivalent of a Coleco Adam from Japan. The C-64 only survived as long as it did because of its floppy drive.
By the time the crash thawed out (with the introduction of the NES in late '85), 16-bit systems were firmly in control for everything but cartridge games. Not just the PC, but the Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari ST.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }