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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.
I'm still peeved about that Bungie gobble up
After all was said and done, the Xbox lost Microsoft 4 billion dollars. They bought their way in.
Microsoft using their leverage in other areas to elbow their way into a new market? You don't say...
I'm sure the U.S. Commerce Secretary and the FTC would've had a field day over this.
A $9.99 upgrade plan from any prior OS would have been enough to avoid that. Instead, they charged $49.99, if my memory serves. But IBM's failure with OS/2 had to do with application development, not price.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I think OS/2 biggest failure was poor marketing compared to Microsoft.
I remember the OS/2 Warp commercials. Just a bunch of people sitting around a computer saying how cool it was then a bunch of trippy colors.
They didn't even show the OS.
While Microsoft for its Windows 95 campaign showed the OS and how easy it was to use, and some of the new features that would make you want it.
Apple does the same thing with their products they are trying to push. You have adds where they show the product and how easy it is to use.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
The main character in Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" used a free, ad-supported XBox reflashed with "Paranoid Linux."
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
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.
So you're saying that they learned from Digital:Convergence and the Cue Cat Scanner debacle?
Once the thing is no longer in one's possession there's a loss of a certain amount of control. Microsoft avoided this becoming epidemic by not handing out Xboxes for free, as most people weren't going to pay several hundred dollars to immediately wipe and install a different OS on it, but absolutely would have if they'd been free. People would have convinced anyone and everyone they knew to get a free one to give to them.
This would have made the Cue Cat fight look like nothing.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I remember OS/2 Warp ads in print magazines. The ads featured a Robinson Projection map of the world, with arrows to specific areas and a blurb about the OS/2 user in that area.
I mused with my friends, "hey, it's a map of all of the OS/2 users in the world!"
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
did 95 even support USB? i thought that was a 98 thing.
Jeez, they don't show many tech ads in my country but I remember seeing the old ipod ads and all they did was shown white silhouettes of people wearing a headphones and dancing with some kind of brick in their hands...
Those ads kickstarted apple rise to the top.
There was an offer on the table for US$20B, but the owner in Japan turned it down over the objections of family members.
I don't think the Office suite was a killer app. Initially many users hated Word especially for being inferior to what was already there, and Excel took off first on the Macintosh and Lotus 1-2-3 was still the king on the PC. It was a slower route to dominance that came from marketing the tools together rather than separately.
Windows itself really did not have a killer app, what really got it kickstarted and popular was that Microsoft made those OEM deals with the same vendors that they had DOS OEM deals with. The PC vendors got huge discounts on DOS and Windows as long as they bundled it with every PC they sold. Thus the average user got DOS and Windows preinstalled. The user who wanted OS/2 often installed it onto a machine that already had Windows. Except for the first couple of years of OS/2 though, but in that case most business people able to spend that high price on an OS for a toy computer were perfectly happy just to be on DOS by itself, or with a 3270 terminal, or a cheaper PC GUI.
Yes, IBM was still sort of stuck thinking the PC was for serious corporate use. Maybe something to distract the executives while the actual workers were interacting with the mainframes (ie, real computers). So their mindset just didn't see the PC as a cheap system for home or small business or independent developers.
I'll grant you that the OEM deals helped, but before even 95 came out, people wanted Office. There were WordPerfect holdouts and people who liked Quattro Pro. But it was fast becoming a Microsoft world and none of the competitors stood a chance against Office. IBM created a suite but it was too little, too late.
The OEM deals wouldn't have worked if people purchasing in the commercial space didn't want Windows. It made things easier than dealing with the licensing for different applications from different vendors, and buying Microsoft appeared cheaper at the time than being on an upgrade treadmill with multiple companies. "You mean I can get rid of Foxpro, Wordperfect and even Novell? Sign me up." This would have happened regardless of the OEM bundling. Reducing the friction of licensing is primarily what won that world for Microsoft.
What the OEM deals primarily did was to make sure home users ended up with Windows, which gave them the gaming market for a while.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
OS/2 failed because:
It was more expensive.
It had higher hardware requirements.
It wasn't as compatible with existing software especially with DOS games.
It wasn't as compatible with 3rd party hardware.
I don't think the advertising had much to do with it at all.
"Apple does the same thing with their products they are trying to push."
um... maybe sometimes... but many signature apple commercials and ads do not show the product:
You might remember a few years of these?
https://www.youtube.com/result...
Or maybe these ipod commercials? from 2004 to 2008
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Oh that's all ancient history. You meant something recent right?
Like 2015. Look at how easy it is to use, and all the new features:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'd say reality doesn't really sync up with your argument here.
OS/2 failed because:
It didn't come pre-installed on all the brand name computers, even IBM's own. You couldn't order a Thinkpad with OS/2 out of the box, only with Windows.
OS/2 Warp's killer feature was an excellent TCP/IP stack, enabling people to use the Internet without voluminous and hacked-together third-party software. It also included one of the better graphical web browsers of the era.
If anything, it was ahead of its time.
Kid-proof tablet..
Or else Nintendo really would have been doomed. Just look at Rare. RIP
By the time of Warp, the battle was over. OS/2 2.0 was IBM's only opportunity - a window between 3.1 and the release of Win 95. They got decent market penetration and even switched a few corporate shops over to OS/2. 2.0 had no TCP/IP stack at the time. I believe it came along with Warp 3.0 Connect, which was released in May 1995, too late to make a difference in the adoption of 3.1 and 95.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
This is kind of funny because I remember people using funky 3270 and 5250 boards with DOS drivers in their OS/2 2.0 workstations. I mean, i'm sure you're right, but i'm also sure that most shops didn't implement this correctly.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Exactly what wasn't going to happen. IBM wasn't going to waste time reimplementing that moving target and there was zero chance MS would license it.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
OS/2 Warp's killer feature was an excellent TCP/IP stack, enabling people to use the Internet without voluminous and hacked-together third-party software.
There was nothing wrong with Trumpet Winsock for modem users. For 10b2 users, the official microsoft stack was adequate. TGV Multinet was a high-performance stack for Windows 3.x which was more than adequate. Sure, you had to have third party software, but there was nothing particularly hackish about it. At the time, you had to deal with equally hacky software to get SLIP (let alone PPP) connectivity on most platforms. Only Unix-based and Unixlikes seem to have come with TCP back then.
Warp cost more than Windows plus a TCP stack...
The killer feature of OS/2 was multitasking that worked. Problem was, nearly nobody had enough RAM to really take advantage of it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Microsoft does "me too". Apple did well with the ipod, Microsoft called up China and ordered a cheap copy. Nintendo and the other companies had good game consoles, Microsoft stuck their name on one, apparently without having much of a clue about the market they were entering. They then lose a billion dollars or so on each, stubbornly refusing to admit failure.
Google checks out the market, then releases something that's best-in-class, or often fairly unique, being the first major offering of it's type. They spend a ten or twenty million trying it out. If it only breaks even, they move on to the next idea. They don't keep at a losing strategy, losing a billion dollars on something. Instead, they move on to the next idea until they find which one will make them a billion dollars.
At the end of the day, that's the difference- Microsoft's big initiatives that they really push for years lose a billion dollars, Google's big projects that they really push make a billion dollars.
* Google tried "me too" once, with Google+. Fortunately for them, they can well afford one big error because they are winning big in a dozen other areas.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here's my own progression:
I used *I forget what* under MS-DOS to establish a PPP (SLIP? whatever) connection, ~1992, to a *nix host. It worked as well as MS-DOS could (and still does) allow.
Later, I used Telemate under MS-DOS to talk to the local Delphi dialup, to talk to Steve Jackson Games' Illuminati Online FreeBSD boxen.
Eventually, a local ISP showed up. I used Winsock on Windows, was disappointed: Things barely worked, which is saying a lot compared to all of the "barely worked" above.
I installed OS/2 on a 486SX with 4MB of RAM. The GUI loaded enough to see it, but then I discovered that OS/2 could run without a GUI: All command-line. It was fast. The TCP/IP stack robust enough to knock random other Internet users offline with a simple ping -f, all while my own connection was still useable: The pings would get longer and longer, and more and more infrequent, and then stop...even if I was on a different port of the exact same terminal server that they had been connected to, and even if asymmetric modem speeds said it shouldn't be that way.
Eventually, I got a Pentium 100 ("arguably overclocked" to a P120), and had 16MB of RAM on that board (16x1MB 30-pin SIMMS on carefully-stacked adapters). Worked a treat: I could finally use OS/2's GUI, and it was usable despite using 4x the RAM and about twice the CPU.
I used Linux after that, starting with Slackware 2.
I put on Windows 95 OSR2 after a then-employer handed me a copy of it and told me it was my job to do email support for his Windows-based software: I still did most of my work with a telnet/ssh session to SJ Games' io.com FreeBSD hosts.
As you can see, OS/2 was a blip on my own radar in those early days. But the Winsock days were really, really bad: Worse than the MS-DOS days.
And OS/2 was as solid as Linux, or the FreeBSD (then a mature thing) hosts that I paid by the month to use.
And OS/2's solid TCP/IP was included. With Windows, it was an extra, fickle (and not cheap, IIRC) third-party add-on.
95 OSR2 did OK, but meh. Nobody cared unless they were trying to get their new Packard Bell online, and then AOL by then the easiest answer. (They didn't get the money to buy Time Warner by accident.)
Kid-proof tablet..