"You've missed the biggest selling point. Every title/developer that made the Ps1 and Ps2 the most successful consoles of all time is still on board for the Ps3...nobody's jumped ship and there are more exclusives than you think. If you enjoyed FF, Gran turismo, Metal Gear, Shin Megami Tensei, Shadow of the Colossus, etc...guess which system you have to buy to keep playing the games you enjoy? for a LOT of people (especially if those people are in japan) there IS no alternative to the Ps3, since certain franchises and genres just won't show up on the 360 or the Wii. "
Um... no. Shadow of Colossus was a tiny success, megami Tensei I'm pretty sure no one has heard of, since I haven't heard of it and I actually flip through game magazines. Final Fantasy is played out with Sequelitis, which applies to most of the 'system-sellers' for the Playstation brand, that's why internet connectivity and the Wii have proven so appealing for the bleeding edge consumer.
I LOVED GT2. That game made me a console gamer. But I have grown less attached to Gran Turismo with each sequel. How much fun is it to play an increasingly longer and drawn out and harder Gran Turismo every 3 years? How many people still play Final Fantasy and HAVEN'T moved onto FFO or WoW?
Your 'system-sellers' theory applied to the NES and SNES. For example, pretty much everyone who owned those had a copy of Zelda and Mario, etc. That's no longer the case. It's close to being the case with Xbox and Halo, but not the PS2. GTA was a HUGE seller, and only in a quarter of the ps2 boxes at most. It's like the movie industry, where it looks like they break records every year - "Harry Potter is the biggest thing EVR!" but in reality a smaller group of people actually go to the theater. So GTA is this gen's blockbuster (our Zelda if you will ~shudder~) but hardly has Zelda's popularity.
X360 came to market first, it's games will be loads cheaper (you can already buy $30 games, but Blu-Ray discs will cost almost that much to make, so Sony can't do that in year 1...or 2) and their Live Arcade service is already in motion. So they will get to the diversity that people want quicker - they will finally have RPGs, for example. GTA will release the same time. EA is not going anywhere.
And there aren't many grown non-Japanese men who will want to wave a Wii-wand around in front of their spouse.
It's not censorship when it's a free service. With your huge words and libertarian stance, it's sad you've taken the easy rhetorical expediency of piling on a minority you don't like, like Bible Belt Christians. But then, with slashdot becoming a mob, where the majority are small-minded bigots with no time for dissent, imposing their own democratic rating censorship on the few people left here with actual deeply-held beliefs, it's an easy trap to fall into.
I'm sure Ask.com doesn't have enough money to get sued. Big deal. Another victim of American legalism, where libertarians hate censorship but laugh when companies get sued.
Google is run by West coast style libertarians/liberals, and also, naturally, their technical abilities and stance allow them to have a broader appeal. So they appeal to most Microsoft employees. Even without vicious lawsuits from selfish trolls and bad parents, Ask.com has to appeal to a difference audience, one that doesn't want pedophilia searches to be successful. So take your overspent moral indignation somewhere else.
I tend to agree with the idea that it's just too freaking big. Why have Windows Live AND Windows Mail AND Windows Calendar AND Outlook? And ship Works with every computer? I know Mail and Calendar aren't holding up Vista, but feature creep has gotten out of control. Three levels of graphics, custom IE7 port, native Widgets,
Microsoft never thought through the human side of the development process, they bought into their marketing that their own software and tools would solve organizational problems, but they don't. They should study the military, well-run hospitals, maybe hire some managers from Oracle.
Because moving the Office guy over isn't going to cut it. There are thousands to manage, and they can't hack it.
Here's a scenario where Blu-Ray movies matter to you:
year 1 1. Sony releases ps3 at high price point to include Blu-Ray, in order to justify premium price of $500-600. 2. Bleeding edge consumers buys all PS3's in first year. 3. Developers only sell a few million ps3 games because of low penetration. 4. x360 price drop. 5. Sony still losing money on ps3. Everyone publishing hd-dvd movies, because Blu-Ray too expensive. ps3 stays at $500.
year 2 1. X360, Wii games lower prices, X360 already has 'Greatest Hits' line (or whatever). 2. Sony's Blu-Ray games still $60. 3. Publishers publishing more for Wii, XLive. 4. Many normal consumers buying $1000 TVs decide X360's games look great and there are more of them, and they are cheaper. And they can still play Madden. 5. Sony can finally afford console price drop. Blu-Ray players cheaper, but still too expensive ($500). Everyone's buying hd-dvds.
year 3 1. hd-dvd production already dirt cheap. Movies and players are promoted at Walmart on Black Friday. Not enough Blu-Rays being burned to drop prices, so... 2. With X360 games half the price and about equal quality, MS is starting to roll in the US, Europe. Wii is rolling in Japan. PS3 publishers are still losing money in some cases due to disc costs and development costs, and too many sequels are released among the few 'A' titles.
In other words, you NEED Blu-Ray movies to succeed for the PS3 to succeed. Because if Sony can't get movies rolling, you'll never see games below $30. Because it's easy to forget this in the age of cd-r's and dvd-r's, but discs cost money. And Blu-Ray discs cost a lot of money. So publishers will make less money on every Blu-Ray game.
If we look at the current console success, it's clear that Blu-Ray is a potential stumbling block. And with popular broadband and hdds in every console, I think we will see episodic gaming, and that will mean even fewer Blu-Ray discs burned per ps3, which means higher game prices for a longer period of time.
This doesn't come from Puritan sensibilities, but from JAPAN, where they still like their games hard. Just buy a multiplayer game. Vote with your dollars, what's the big deal, there are like thousands of games to choose from, and most games are about as dumbed down as possible, thanks in large part to EA and their stockholders.
I think MS is on the wrong track, but they are hardly going to lose their franchise.
1. Every new computer will have Vista in it by holiday season next year. 2. Vista (and the 1 billion configurations they sell) will help retain subscribers, their most important revenue-enhancing initiative. 3. Vista will help sell PC games. It helps that the PS3 is over-priced. 4. Security is actually really much better since XP SP2. Certainly good enough for their corporate sales. 5. Office shows real improvement. 6. X360 has a real chance to make money.
Here are the only things that should trouble an MS investor, in order of importance: 1. Sparing no expense to chase Google. Good money is chasing bad, and it isn't obvious to me how their monopoly power is helping - or is going to help them 'innovate'.
Worse, as a stockholder, they're withholding dividends of a massively successful monopoly to chase an advertising/broadcast segment that can only hurt their customer relationships.
2. Virtualizing and remote desktop services will eat away at MS's core income. Outsourcing plays into this, and it's a negative sum game for MS. Without networked clients, they sell one OS per computer, and one computer per user. In a networked world, 3 people in India share the same computer AND OS and replace three users in U.S. Plus, they are more likely to use illegal or old copies of the software to save money. Clients are cheap, but this effect is real. 3. Their media center initiative is going nowhere. It looks like online TV is headed to regular online standards: abc.com came after itunes, aol has tv shows, youtube has video. Media Center was going to be a premium edition and create more profit, and that isn't happening. 4. They are competing with too many customers, picking too many fights, especially online (so, if Fox owns Myspace, and MS creates a myspace competitor, why would Fox use Windows Media formats?). 5. Windows/Office development is getting unwieldy for the pre-eminent technology company? Not a good sign. 6. Their SoaS/Windows/Office roadmap doesn't exist.
Personally, on the consumer side, Vista is the only choice next year, because it's "free" with every computer. My only serious problem with Windows before was security, and UAC should solve that, even if my relatives end up confused half the time, at least they can't completely disable the computer with spy/adware. Of course, I wouldn't buy it before sp1.
I have a Gateway with a 15" screen for less than $800. Who cares about speed when it's just my home machine? It's not like you can play games on a Macbook, anyway. What's the duo core going to be doing?
I can get a computer with Windows XP for less than $500. I can even get a laptop for about $600 or less. But I can't get Mac OSX for less than $599, and now they've raised prices on their entry level laptop(?) I can't get Mac OSX in a portable size for less than $1099. So the pricing is bad.
I'm not arguing whether this is a real value, I'm just saying they need a real entry level laptop. Something for mom and pop to web-surf and look at baby pictures.
The point is that you need HDMI to achieve the full graphics. And you need it to watch Blu-Ray movies. So without HDMI, you might as well buy the Xbox 360, because it is massively cheaper. It's the same as if Blu-Ray goes betamax. Then you can just play games and DVDs, same as the X360.
And yeah, who cares about the other stuff, right? Except at $499, the 20gb model still costs more than the x360. And you can already buy one, and the games still look better so far...
I doubt the laptop drive thing will fly, with the security built into the Cell. But who knows?
contradicts everything else you say. The X360 is easier to develop for. Even these PS3 games weren't really ready, and there's only half a year left. I know we'll only get the ps3 equivalent of Bandit's Run for launch titles anyway - but long-term PS3's game will be harder or impossible to port. MS can always release a motion sensing controller at a later date (which I assumed Sony and MS would anyway) but Sony can't change from the Cell.
I'm shocked that hard drives are standard equipment. Looks like MS bet wrong in that direction.
And I just wanted to say, I don't see backwards compatibility being a big deal for PS3. There are so many sequels and so few original role-playing games on all the systems, I can't see it being a major selling point. Whereas, on the PS2, I was still working through classic squaresoft titles like FF7,8,9 and Tactics, there just isn't a compelling reason for backwards compatibility - especially when we start viewing everything on HDTVs. Yes, it would be cool to see GT4 on the big screen, but not $600 good.
They lost 3 major chip contracts in the biggest game in town. Nintendo, Sony and MS are going to sell a lot more high performance chips than Dell in the next 5 years. Consumer PCs are cheaper and cheaper every year and Intel has to compete with AMD.
So, to review: AMD is cutting into Intel's margins, PCs are getting cheaper by the day, Vista hasn't come out yet to goose PC sales, and every console in on PowerPC chips. Cell phones still don't have Intel inside. Nvidia is taking money from Intel's biggest PC game fans.
Something tells me that Intel was the desperate one in the Apple/Intel hookup. Apple didn't even go with Intel's custom chips, so now they can leave for AMD when they want to. I think Intel is really desperate to sell high end chips, which Apple does better than anyone.
The difference is that the FCC regulates telcom monopolies. Whether they're doing it well is an issue for the next election. As usual, people think they're voting with their pocketbook on tax issues, and ignore the legal monopolies that really bite them. So Time Warner doesn't have to give me channel selection, but we have cheap gasoline. It's a toss-up, but I think gasoline is more important.
I've never had a problem with OO's conversion, way better than MSs. The only serious drawbacks are VBA, and that's become kind of a joke in this internet world.
A total knockoff of Mac OSX graphics that will somehow not run on the current years' hardware, when OSX can run on freaking underpowered Apple computers from the last 5 years!
Never mind that consumer computers are slower than ever, with people buying wifi laptops and cell phones instead of big multimedia gaming desktops. I'm so glad they found a way to bilk more money from their customers instead of offering free new features that work like Google - with current hardware and software.
Slashdot Mirror
"You've missed the biggest selling point. Every title/developer that made the Ps1 and Ps2 the most successful consoles of all time is still on board for the Ps3...nobody's jumped ship and there are more exclusives than you think. If you enjoyed FF, Gran turismo, Metal Gear, Shin Megami Tensei, Shadow of the Colossus, etc...guess which system you have to buy to keep playing the games you enjoy? for a LOT of people (especially if those people are in japan) there IS no alternative to the Ps3, since certain franchises and genres just won't show up on the 360 or the Wii. "
Um... no. Shadow of Colossus was a tiny success, megami Tensei I'm pretty sure no one has heard of, since I haven't heard of it and I actually flip through game magazines. Final Fantasy is played out with Sequelitis, which applies to most of the 'system-sellers' for the Playstation brand, that's why internet connectivity and the Wii have proven so appealing for the bleeding edge consumer.
I LOVED GT2. That game made me a console gamer. But I have grown less attached to Gran Turismo with each sequel. How much fun is it to play an increasingly longer and drawn out and harder Gran Turismo every 3 years? How many people still play Final Fantasy and HAVEN'T moved onto FFO or WoW?
Your 'system-sellers' theory applied to the NES and SNES. For example, pretty much everyone who owned those had a copy of Zelda and Mario, etc. That's no longer the case. It's close to being the case with Xbox and Halo, but not the PS2. GTA was a HUGE seller, and only in a quarter of the ps2 boxes at most. It's like the movie industry, where it looks like they break records every year - "Harry Potter is the biggest thing EVR!" but in reality a smaller group of people actually go to the theater. So GTA is this gen's blockbuster (our Zelda if you will ~shudder~) but hardly has Zelda's popularity.
X360 came to market first, it's games will be loads cheaper (you can already buy $30 games, but Blu-Ray discs will cost almost that much to make, so Sony can't do that in year 1...or 2) and their Live Arcade service is already in motion. So they will get to the diversity that people want quicker - they will finally have RPGs, for example. GTA will release the same time. EA is not going anywhere.
And there aren't many grown non-Japanese men who will want to wave a Wii-wand around in front of their spouse.
What do you want, a refund?
It's not censorship when it's a free service. With your huge words and libertarian stance, it's sad you've taken the easy rhetorical expediency of piling on a minority you don't like, like Bible Belt Christians. But then, with slashdot becoming a mob, where the majority are small-minded bigots with no time for dissent, imposing their own democratic rating censorship on the few people left here with actual deeply-held beliefs, it's an easy trap to fall into.
I'm sure Ask.com doesn't have enough money to get sued. Big deal. Another victim of American legalism, where libertarians hate censorship but laugh when companies get sued.
Google is run by West coast style libertarians/liberals, and also, naturally, their technical abilities and stance allow them to have a broader appeal. So they appeal to most Microsoft employees. Even without vicious lawsuits from selfish trolls and bad parents, Ask.com has to appeal to a difference audience, one that doesn't want pedophilia searches to be successful. So take your overspent moral indignation somewhere else.
3 of the worst movies ever made?
I tend to agree with the idea that it's just too freaking big. Why have Windows Live AND Windows Mail AND Windows Calendar AND Outlook? And ship Works with every computer? I know Mail and Calendar aren't holding up Vista, but feature creep has gotten out of control. Three levels of graphics, custom IE7 port, native Widgets,
Microsoft never thought through the human side of the development process, they bought into their marketing that their own software and tools would solve organizational problems, but they don't. They should study the military, well-run hospitals, maybe hire some managers from Oracle.
Because moving the Office guy over isn't going to cut it. There are thousands to manage, and they can't hack it.
Here's a scenario where Blu-Ray movies matter to you:
year 1
1. Sony releases ps3 at high price point to include Blu-Ray, in order to justify premium price of $500-600.
2. Bleeding edge consumers buys all PS3's in first year.
3. Developers only sell a few million ps3 games because of low penetration.
4. x360 price drop.
5. Sony still losing money on ps3. Everyone publishing hd-dvd movies, because Blu-Ray too expensive. ps3 stays at $500.
year 2
1. X360, Wii games lower prices, X360 already has 'Greatest Hits' line (or whatever).
2. Sony's Blu-Ray games still $60.
3. Publishers publishing more for Wii, XLive.
4. Many normal consumers buying $1000 TVs decide X360's games look great and there are more of them, and they are cheaper. And they can still play Madden.
5. Sony can finally afford console price drop. Blu-Ray players cheaper, but still too expensive ($500). Everyone's buying hd-dvds.
year 3
1. hd-dvd production already dirt cheap. Movies and players are promoted at Walmart on Black Friday. Not enough Blu-Rays being burned to drop prices, so...
2. With X360 games half the price and about equal quality, MS is starting to roll in the US, Europe. Wii is rolling in Japan. PS3 publishers are still losing money in some cases due to disc costs and development costs, and too many sequels are released among the few 'A' titles.
In other words, you NEED Blu-Ray movies to succeed for the PS3 to succeed. Because if Sony can't get movies rolling, you'll never see games below $30. Because it's easy to forget this in the age of cd-r's and dvd-r's, but discs cost money. And Blu-Ray discs cost a lot of money. So publishers will make less money on every Blu-Ray game.
If we look at the current console success, it's clear that Blu-Ray is a potential stumbling block. And with popular broadband and hdds in every console, I think we will see episodic gaming, and that will mean even fewer Blu-Ray discs burned per ps3, which means higher game prices for a longer period of time.
Why look at the calendar? I'm eagerly awaiting Windows Vista 2000! A very good vintage for MS!
All two of you Games Workshop fans must be really bitter.
This doesn't come from Puritan sensibilities, but from JAPAN, where they still like their games hard. Just buy a multiplayer game. Vote with your dollars, what's the big deal, there are like thousands of games to choose from, and most games are about as dumbed down as possible, thanks in large part to EA and their stockholders.
I think MS is on the wrong track, but they are hardly going to lose their franchise.
1. Every new computer will have Vista in it by holiday season next year.
2. Vista (and the 1 billion configurations they sell) will help retain subscribers, their most important revenue-enhancing initiative.
3. Vista will help sell PC games. It helps that the PS3 is over-priced.
4. Security is actually really much better since XP SP2. Certainly good enough for their corporate sales.
5. Office shows real improvement.
6. X360 has a real chance to make money.
Here are the only things that should trouble an MS investor, in order of importance:
1. Sparing no expense to chase Google. Good money is chasing bad, and it isn't obvious to me how their monopoly power is helping - or is going to help them 'innovate'.
Worse, as a stockholder, they're withholding dividends of a massively successful monopoly to chase an advertising/broadcast segment that can only hurt their customer relationships.
2. Virtualizing and remote desktop services will eat away at MS's core income. Outsourcing plays into this, and it's a negative sum game for MS. Without networked clients, they sell one OS per computer, and one computer per user. In a networked world, 3 people in India share the same computer AND OS and replace three users in U.S. Plus, they are more likely to use illegal or old copies of the software to save money. Clients are cheap, but this effect is real.
3. Their media center initiative is going nowhere. It looks like online TV is headed to regular online standards: abc.com came after itunes, aol has tv shows, youtube has video. Media Center was going to be a premium edition and create more profit, and that isn't happening.
4. They are competing with too many customers, picking too many fights, especially online (so, if Fox owns Myspace, and MS creates a myspace competitor, why would Fox use Windows Media formats?).
5. Windows/Office development is getting unwieldy for the pre-eminent technology company? Not a good sign.
6. Their SoaS/Windows/Office roadmap doesn't exist.
Personally, on the consumer side, Vista is the only choice next year, because it's "free" with every computer. My only serious problem with Windows before was security, and UAC should solve that, even if my relatives end up confused half the time, at least they can't completely disable the computer with spy/adware. Of course, I wouldn't buy it before sp1.
You can't upgrade the tiny screen!
I have a Gateway with a 15" screen for less than $800. Who cares about speed when it's just my home machine? It's not like you can play games on a Macbook, anyway. What's the duo core going to be doing?
I can get a computer with Windows XP for less than $500. I can even get a laptop for about $600 or less. But I can't get Mac OSX for less than $599, and now they've raised prices on their entry level laptop(?) I can't get Mac OSX in a portable size for less than $1099. So the pricing is bad.
I'm not arguing whether this is a real value, I'm just saying they need a real entry level laptop. Something for mom and pop to web-surf and look at baby pictures.
The point is that you need HDMI to achieve the full graphics. And you need it to watch Blu-Ray movies. So without HDMI, you might as well buy the Xbox 360, because it is massively cheaper. It's the same as if Blu-Ray goes betamax. Then you can just play games and DVDs, same as the X360.
And yeah, who cares about the other stuff, right? Except at $499, the 20gb model still costs more than the x360. And you can already buy one, and the games still look better so far...
I doubt the laptop drive thing will fly, with the security built into the Cell. But who knows?
contradicts everything else you say. The X360 is easier to develop for. Even these PS3 games weren't really ready, and there's only half a year left. I know we'll only get the ps3 equivalent of Bandit's Run for launch titles anyway - but long-term PS3's game will be harder or impossible to port. MS can always release a motion sensing controller at a later date (which I assumed Sony and MS would anyway) but Sony can't change from the Cell.
I'm shocked that hard drives are standard equipment. Looks like MS bet wrong in that direction.
And I just wanted to say, I don't see backwards compatibility being a big deal for PS3. There are so many sequels and so few original role-playing games on all the systems, I can't see it being a major selling point. Whereas, on the PS2, I was still working through classic squaresoft titles like FF7,8,9 and Tactics, there just isn't a compelling reason for backwards compatibility - especially when we start viewing everything on HDTVs. Yes, it would be cool to see GT4 on the big screen, but not $600 good.
Without Blu-Ray in the $499 version, both Sony and Blu-Ray are dead. I can't believe ken glossed over this.
It will be the best movie ever made... when it's finished 20 years from now. And tickets will cost $50. How is that Ghost project going again?
I had my money on Core Duo 2.
They lost 3 major chip contracts in the biggest game in town. Nintendo, Sony and MS are going to sell a lot more high performance chips than Dell in the next 5 years. Consumer PCs are cheaper and cheaper every year and Intel has to compete with AMD.
So, to review: AMD is cutting into Intel's margins, PCs are getting cheaper by the day, Vista hasn't come out yet to goose PC sales, and every console in on PowerPC chips. Cell phones still don't have Intel inside. Nvidia is taking money from Intel's biggest PC game fans.
Something tells me that Intel was the desperate one in the Apple/Intel hookup. Apple didn't even go with Intel's custom chips, so now they can leave for AMD when they want to. I think Intel is really desperate to sell high end chips, which Apple does better than anyone.
The difference is that the FCC regulates telcom monopolies. Whether they're doing it well is an issue for the next election. As usual, people think they're voting with their pocketbook on tax issues, and ignore the legal monopolies that really bite them. So Time Warner doesn't have to give me channel selection, but we have cheap gasoline. It's a toss-up, but I think gasoline is more important.
Thank God. It's why I use it. Sorry, but cygwin's a little idiosyncratic, so until Redmond releases a real Bash on XP, this is it.
The Network is the CEO!!!
I've never had a problem with OO's conversion, way better than MSs. The only serious drawbacks are VBA, and that's become kind of a joke in this internet world.
A total knockoff of Mac OSX graphics that will somehow not run on the current years' hardware, when OSX can run on freaking underpowered Apple computers from the last 5 years!
Never mind that consumer computers are slower than ever, with people buying wifi laptops and cell phones instead of big multimedia gaming desktops. I'm so glad they found a way to bilk more money from their customers instead of offering free new features that work like Google - with current hardware and software.
But wait. I want to hear about the country fan mail...!
Minesweeper will get the recognition it deserves!!!
That the consumer is going to reap the benefits of all the extra time put into Vista.....