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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!
You must be new here. We have a Microsoft bitch-fest everyday even if they don't make anything newsworthy. It's either a Windows 8 post, or some rumour about DRM on the xbox, or Stallman saying something dumb, or something about UEFI, and if all those fail then we find some random guy that quit a decade ago and writes a butthurt blog post.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
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.
The ones about UEFI annoy me the most. Too many people, even on slashdot of all places, think UEFI is just a graphical addon to BIOS that also adds DRM. It's nothing of the sort, most existing UEFI systems on OEM computers have a text based configuration tool and don't even secure boot. (Windows 8 mandates the change of the later of course.) Further, BIOS also had DRM capability.
UEFI is a complete replacement of BIOS. BIOS had a ton of restrictions related to all sorts of things, e.g. partition count and size on the bootable hard disk, BIOS requires POST (which in modern systems needlessly adds to the boot time) as well as a ton of reserved and now useless for decades interrupts. These new things that you find with UEFI (e.g. graphical configuration tool) are simply new features that UEFI allows for, but aren't required.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
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.
Because of DirectX, duh.
Ok, these are the ACTUAL complaints in the article:
1) Microsoft has purposefully locked out small developers from contributing to XBox.
2) Cluttered interface that bombards the user with unnecessary and confusing pop-ups.
3) Apple may be able to get control of the console business if they open up their Apple Store ecosystem to Apple TV
Did MS flatline because Bill left, or was it always going to flatline around then because it MS had reached that point where it couldn't go after new markets without canniblising it's core income streams and competitors were lined up to take advantage of that.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
No, it was when Bill left. A quick look at the history of Balmer shows that he is very big on slaying dragons but not very big on plundering their hoards. Even worse, he prefers to attack without a technological advantage, instead preferring to rely on the massive cash of MS. He took on Google with Bing, the Playstation with XBox, the iPod with Zune, the iPhone and Android with Windows Phone, the iPad with Surface RT, Java with .NET, and Flash with Silverlight. How many of these were big successes?
Compare this to Jobs, who took failed and under-realized ideas (portable music player, tablets, digital music, etc.) and made them work well. Even their PCs and laptops are based on the system model that MS largely destroyed decades earlier in the home market, relegating it to scientific, business, and other specialized applications.
The contrast is like night and day: one struck while the competitors were weak and executed well to carry the day; the other struck while the competitors were strong and executed mediocrily, at best, using massive cash to carry the day.
Yes, it does need "all that bullshit." Booting from anything except an on-board hard disk controller on a PC BIOS is a hackjob. It's just an absolutely horrible clusterfuck. The fact that it ever works at all is a testament to the hard work put in over the past 20+ years by all the bootable expansion card makers.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but your comment really makes me think that you've never used anything except a desktop PC. In the server world, you always boot from an expansion card -- note that onboard NICs count as expansion cards in this context, because the BIOS can't boot from them directly; it has to pass control to the NIC's BIOS, which handles PXE -- at least once in the server's life to kickstart it. And there are a good number of situations where you never boot from a local hard disk. That's not just PXE. It also includes iSCSI and FC HBAs, ROMs or flash devices, RAID controllers, and probably a raft of things that I've simply never encountered.
I think that OpenBoot would've been a better choice than UEFI, personally. But I don't think any knowledgeable person can dispute the need for something better than the 1980s-era PC BIOS.
it gets worse...
With ballmer under control they took winning ideas and killed them. For example, .NET and C# did become very successful. What did they do? They killed it in the "new" paradigm called Windows 8.
they had one of the most successful third party dev program and they killed it. Compare the price of MSDN universal when Gates was under control, and when Ballmer was under control. It is not funny! I did a price comparison of Linux, OSX, and Windows as a development environment for a small business or consultant. In this price comparison I included the price of hardware since you do need computers to run things.
Guess which was the cheapest... Drum roll Linux. Guess which was the most expensive? Drum roll Windows, and by quite a bit! OSX was only a bit more expensive than Linux. Windows was just downright expensive when you add things like Office, Windows Server, MSDN development (not talking the universal package, just the 1200 USD package).
What shocked me is that OSX is not that much more expensive than Linux. For hardware does cost quite a bit if you do an apples to apples comparison (excuse the pun). Granted that Apple is still more expensive for the same hardware, but it is not as much as I thought it was.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
i never claimed to have run the army. at best i was a grunt-turned-sergeant-awkwardly-promoted-to-captain who had the ears of the generals because i knew what we could build, who could build it, and i could describe it to everybody - i was boots on the ground. i'm just pointing out that i think the current strategy is wrong and will likely fail, not that i was running it better back in the day.
n@