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Xbox Originator: "Stupid, Stupid Xbox!!"
Freshly Exhumed writes "You can't begrudge Nat Brown for claiming some pride in the birth of Microsoft's game console: 'I was a founder of the original xBox project at Microsoft and gave it its name. Almost 14 years after the painful, pointless, and idiotic internal cage-match to get it started and funded, the hard selling of a compelling and lucrative living-room product to Bill (and then Steve as he began to take over), a product that consumers would want and love and demand, I am actually still thrilled to see how far it has come...' But in his recent ILIKE.CODE blog post he is driven to lament that '...as usual, Microsoft has jumped its own shark and is out stomping through the weeds planning and talking about far-flung future strategies in interactive television and original programming partnerships with big dying media companies when their core product, their home town is on fire, their soldiers, their developers, are tired and deserting, and their supply-lines are broken.' Nat goes on to detail a list of Microsoft's past and present strategic Xbox blunders, while tossing some barbs towards Nintendo's and Sony's game console strategies."
It's the interface. It sucks. I bought a machine to game on, not one to sell me other crap. Two years ago when they changed to pre metro I boxed up the x-box and games and gave it to my nephews.
X-Box is doomed. Simply because it's not about gaming, but all about sales.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I disagree. I think most of their arcade games are "shitty" as it is. Plus why should I pay $15 for a title on my xbox when I can get the same game cheaper on four other platforms for less? PLUS, it doesn't cost me $5 a month to take full advantage of my iPad.
A more open and competitively priced market is exactly the thing that would bring me back, but Windows 8 had proven that they have other plans.
Oh look, it's another retired general bitching about how much better things were when he led the army. File this one under W for 'Wozniak'.
The number 1 issue I have with MS and Xbox is that even after paying around $60 a year for their service I still get bombarded with advertisements covering upwards of HALF my f*cking screen!!! Where the hell is the money going if it's not going towards paying to have a clean, ad-free service?
Everyone else long ago noticed how MS flatlined when Bill left, besides the fact that he was obviously a visionary and genius (and not half bad at business either). You may disagree with a ton of things he did, and rightly so on many of them, but you can't look at Microsoft's massive rise and Bill's obvious driving of said rise and go "Yeah, Bill leaving MS was the best thing that happened to them". It's patently ridiculous.
Ballmer is doing a bull run full ahead and don't care a bit about what the customers think. Not only the Xbox live account requirement is evidence of that but also the fact that the Windows 8 UI is something that's best useful for three year old kids and not useful for the advanced users.
I suspect that Microsoft has had it's peak and now they are into the process and business model that we saw that many big computer corporations were following during the 70's and 80's where you locked the systems through obscurity. Next step would be a CPU class based licensing of Windows.
The reason why M$ did grow big was that there was not much heavy copy-protection and license key mess in the beginning. People copied the OS from work to run at home as well and so on. It may have been a lost sale, but not many home users would have purchased the full license anyway.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If there is a more obvious piece of astroturf anywhere I'd love to see it. But the bit about loving what you can do with the Xbox you don't actually own is almost as classic as mentioning Smart Glass and capitalizing it.
"seriously, the bootloader on modern hardware doesn't need all that bullshit..."
Just what is "all that bullshit"? People that make these comments have no idea.
"The rest of UEFI is fluff. "
Point out some of this "fluff" specifically.