Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Considered Giving Away Original Xbox
donniebaseball23 writes While the term 'Xbox' is firmly implanted in every gamer's mind today, when Microsoft first set out to launch a console in 2001, people weren't sure what to expect and Microsoft clearly wasn't sure what approach to take to the market. As Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley explained, "In the early days of Xbox, especially before we had figured out how to get greenlit for the project as a pure game console, everybody and their brother who saw the new project starting tried to come in and say it should be free, say it should be forced to run Windows after some period of time." Blackley added that other ideas were pushed around at Microsoft too, like Microsoft should just gobble up Nintendo. "Just name it, name a bad idea and it was something we had to deal with," he said.
Agreed. if it weren't for Halo and the subsequent lock-in to that console, I suspect the XBox wouldn't have really gotten anywhere.
Consider that the XBox was still a massive money-sink for years on end, and I daresay that it has still not yet reached its overall ROI, let alone a profit. If it were built/sold by any company other than Microsoft (or similar behemoth-sized), the company would have gone broke years ago from it. They may eventually reach ROI and turn a profit, but I think that's still a couple of years off at best, and after that, I have no idea what kind of profit margin it would have.
My best guess is that Microsoft wanted to (and is still desperately trying to) make the XBox into a home media center, to the exclusion of everything else (DVRs, dedicated DVD/Blu-Ray players, etc). They may still latch on a cablecard/sat receiver, and maybe some tie-in to "The Internet of Things" (or whatever buzzphrase is being used nowadays), so that it becomes the brain of the "smart home"(ditto), so as to lock-in a potential market. But then, people being what they are, they stubbornly go out and buy tablets, 3rd-party home alarm/HVAC controllers, decide to use Dish instead of DirecTV or Comcast, run out and buy a Sling/AppleTV/Roku box, etc. I think it's that diversity (and the entrenchment of the players in it) which has kept them from making that final drive. This in the end may well turn the whole XBox thing into a permanent anchor on Microsoft's profit margins unless costs are cut somewhere... which makes me wonder why the shareholders haven't demanded that the console be made profitable or else.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
More than that... in 2012, I had once estimated that they blew $7bn on the enterprise, and though they're raking in something like $200m/yr (IIRC) in profits now
(mostly from dev house licensing), they have yet to fill that titanic money hole they dug with the thing.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Every successful OS over the microcomputer age has had a killer app, something that it did that other competing machines did not. Something to sell it. Apple IIs had VisiCalc. The IBM PC had Lotus 1-2-3. Macintoshes had Pagemaker and later Quark. Windows had the Office suite, ultimately. OS/2 had nothing. Sure, it was great at running other OS' apps - it was a great DOS emulator and did Windows 3.1 pretty excellently, but it had no killer app of its own. This was mainly because IBM didn't consider it important to get people to write apps for its OS.
You can call that a lack of marketing and still be right. It's just not "marketing in general" but "marketing to developers".
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
EEE, they simply don't care. Apologies if you have been fooled into thinking there is some new and more altruistic MS Philosophy and I hurt your reality..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.