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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, I thought of that too. In the book, Microsoft gave them away for free, thinking they were unhackable, and hoping to make their money back selling games. People found out how to hack them (surprise, surprise) and were able to run whatever they wanted to on them. This is why this concept of giving away the hardware for free is almost always a bad idea. If they really could build unhackable hardware, then I could see a business case for this, but making the hardware free makes the payoff for hacking it way too high.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.