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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.
And, as usual, without having the slightest idea of what to do with the technology other than try to get market share.
So I'm forced to conclude most of the successes Microsoft has had in the last decade or more have largely been accidental instead of strategic, and that Microsoft just stumbles around in the dark until something works.
And then they spend years trying to understand why it worked in the first place and how to replicate it.
It's official, Microsoft is the Inspector Clouseau of the tech world.
That's pretty sad.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
There's nothing wrong with trying things and stumbling across a working product, solution or theory. That's what humans have been doing for as long as we have existed. Every company I've worked for have tried to introduce new services or products not knowing ahead of time if they would be successful. Some were, some weren't.
On a side note, MS has always taken tons of feedback from their partners, big and small. What they have done more recently is actually listen to the end users, something they lacked to do in the past.
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.