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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!
The number 1 issue I have with MS and Xbox is that even after paying around $60 a year for their service I still get bombarded with advertisements covering upwards of HALF my f*cking screen!!! Where the hell is the money going if it's not going towards paying to have a clean, ad-free service?
Ballmer is doing a bull run full ahead and don't care a bit about what the customers think. Not only the Xbox live account requirement is evidence of that but also the fact that the Windows 8 UI is something that's best useful for three year old kids and not useful for the advanced users.
I suspect that Microsoft has had it's peak and now they are into the process and business model that we saw that many big computer corporations were following during the 70's and 80's where you locked the systems through obscurity. Next step would be a CPU class based licensing of Windows.
The reason why M$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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