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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."
You know, I saw a commercial for a Surface last night. It depicted a bunch of 20-something misanthropes at "work" doing something that could be likened to having epileptic seizures on a conference room table, tossing their tablets about as if they were frisbees and displaying facial expressions like my dog makes when it's trying to take a crap.
In the time since then, I still have no idea what Surface is, does, or how it would help my organization get anything done. All I remember are a bunch of idiots acting like idiots and not doing any work.
It's like they were *trying* to sell this device, whatever it is, to business, by appealing to the worse type of employee imaginable. That doesn't seem like much of a success strategy to me.
Seriously, watch a couple of these commercials and tell me that there is a clear message about how this thing is actually useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7UlE-o8DQQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr3dFSzh1yU
Maybe I'm just old and unhip and still believe that going to work is for working.