>Imagine if Microsoft had taken that approach when they built Xbox, they knew some products are a marathon not a race.
Xbox nearly died in development, as Bill Gates was none too pleased with the decision. Fries recalls Microsoft's "Valentine's Day Massacre" in which Bill Gates furiously ripped apart the development team for circumventing his original idea.
>Microsoft is mixed - for every Xbox and Hololens there's a Courier.
My perception of Microsoft is that it's a Hydra.
The upside is that it's not all bad! The head responsible for the product you care for might have been there for a long time, and is doing a really good job in keeping it up.
The downside is that the other heads might be doing something entirely different and turn the whole beast around .
And while all this is going on, some heads just get chopped off here and there.
> Oh for fuck's sake the 360 was a PowerPC arch, and the new Xbox is x86.
And who's fault is that? The consumers? Microsoft is the one that's being "so dumb". People obviously care about backwards compat. and then they did this stupid bullshit.
> You know how PS3 used to support old games?
Ummm, the right fucking way? You know...by doing what it takes and giving the customers what they obviously fucking want?
Why don't you get your head out of your fucking asshole, asshole?
> "Microsoft screwed up with the announcement of the Xbox One and they were never able to recover from that."
Put the blame where it belongs: Don Mattrick screwed up the positioning and announcement of the Xbox One and they were never able to recover from that.
>great products if someone would actually pay attention to the details and implement a forced eating their own dog food policy.
When it comes to consumer tech, I don't think Microsoft's products are bad. The Xbox is amazing, the Zune HD was amazing, Windows Phone is a great product, and I'm sure Windows 8 has its strengths (I've never used it).
I'm not in the position to say so, but I believe Microsoft's problem is either one of leadership or culture. Microsoft doesn't innovate, its a "me too" company in the consumer space. Zune, Windows Phone, and to a lesser extent, Xbox are all "me too" products. Even worse, there doesn't seem to be any incentive to switch. What does WP have that the iPhone doesn't? Now What does Android have that the iPhone doesn't? You can argue that Android copied iPhone, but Google didn't just copy it, they made a conscious effort to take risks and go one step above. I haven't seen that with Microsoft.
It seems to me any consumer decision that doesn't either 1.) Make more money for an existing product or 2.) Attempts to step into a well known, fast rising space gets killed. The biggest example in my mind for this was the Courier. The Courier was first hinted at in 2008, 2 years before the iPad. Someone at Microsoft had a hunch (because Microsoft has a ton of smart people), that this wave was coming and created a brand new experience. It wasn't me too, and it wasn't a proven market. It was innovation and vision. And we all know how it turned out, it was killed because it couldn't sell more copies of office[1], and instead we got the HP Slate, which was lackluster, and then the Surface, 4 years later which ended up being written down.
At the end of the day, I don't see Microsoft taking any real risks in the consumer space (aside from Xbox).
> It is not a beloved consumer brand like Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or Google.
the reason for this is very simple: very few people choose to use Microsoft products willingly (except maybe the xbox)
their products either come with the computer by default or it's installed on your work machine
and the software is at the very best mediocre and somehow getting worse (trying to figure out how to save a Word document locally these days is NOT easy)
[1]: even for the original xbox Microsoft initially deliberately kept their name off of it
> Except that IE was just a clone of Netscape and XBox was an attempt to duplicate PlayStation. Neither of these were original or ground breaking products.
This is completely irrelevant. By the same logic, iPod was nothing special, just another mp3 player.
IE and XBox managed to muscle into an established market. This is harder than making a new market, and should very much be congratulated.
> In fact with IE 6 he so badly misjudged the market that he assumed the game was over and didn't even bother continuing development. IE 7 didn't come out until 4 years later!
Not so much misjudged, but started seeing as a threat. IE development hit a wall because the meme that web-based apps will replace windows-based apps got popular, and Microsoft didn't want to wipe out their own monopoly. IE4-IE6 were, at the time, absolutely crushingly good. IE6 is now remembered as the really bad browser, but that is because they stopped updating it, and in the later years it had to compete with much, much better browsers.
> You count XBox as a success, yet MS is in the hole over XBox by over a Billion dollars and will probably never make money on it, taking past losses and write-offs into account.
XBox also supports windows game development, strengthening their main money maker. What is that worth?
> They are very good at committing to a project, and being in it for the long haul.
Nobody has yet mentioned Microsoft PlaysForSure. Those clowns really screwed the pooch on that one. They got their "partners" to commit to a form of DRM that the Zune (brown bar of turd) didn't support and that Microsoft then abandoned.
How's the "long haul" working out for that particular fiasco?
Sorry if this sounds like a rant (which it is). But I don't understand how Microsoft's numerous mistakes keep getting erased into the mists of time. This wasn't something that happened eons ago. PlaysForSure was introduced a mere ten years ago.
> What I wonder about is what's in it for Microsoft.
I've always thought of video games for Microsoft as a vanity project in the same way family sedan car companies build supercars. It provides a high-performance focal point for development that trickles down useful technologies everywhere else in the manufacturing process.
DirectX, for example, probably wouldn't have ever happened if Microsoft just cared about making office productivity software.
> By the time Microsoft started shipping it's own hardware, it was too late.
I think if any company had a chance, it was Microsoft. They are the only ones with the in house expertise and cash flow that could have sustained the kind of spending needed for the 10 or whatever years it required.
Of course, it would have required a lot of short term sacrifice, which obviously their executives could not stomach.
> but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past
I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations and feel bad for/protective of them.
And let's be honest, we're not talking about "mistakes", we're talking about a decades-long strategy which was methodically executed to cultivate good will, and then take advantage of it to destroy competitors.
> MS has devoted more effort in recent years to fixing gaming issues.
Could've fooled me. Their first party title Halo MCC is riddled with bugs (crashes, textures not loading, etc.) and has cheaters flaunting super speed in multiplayer.
I worked on a consumer product in a highly competitive space. Our competition released products that dropped frames and had laggy UIs.
The discussion wasn't "We're going to make a smoother UI so our users have a wonderful and pleasant experience." it was "Hah, how the hell, they have literally 20x the CPU power, a GPU, over 1000x the RAM, and they are dropping frames? Let's show'em how its done!"
In certain domains, and when trying to perform at certain levels, you need every single human emotion you can draw on to get enough energy to find the motivation to do amazing work.
Is that needed 99% of the time? Nope. But MS sure as hell could have used someone pissed off about their mobile experience being terrible about, oh, say, 3 years earlier than what did happen.
Another example. Gmail launched 2004. Imagine if 2002 a senior leader at Microsoft had burst into a meeting of the Hotmail leadership team and started shouting "Why the hell do other email providers even still exist? And why the fuck do I have to still delete emails every couple of days? I want every other free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!"
But instead, someone at Google got upset about the same problem and made a product that completely dominated the entire consumer email market.
If you go into a competitive space (especially consumer!) with the idea of "we'll look at the market research and do what is needed to establish a place for ourselves" then no one cares about you.
"We're going to make a product that makes everyone else on the market look like incompetent jerks" is an actual mission statement that can be used to get things done.
The competition has a painful first run experience? Yours isn't better, it is perfect. Why? Because screw the competition. Your competitors have fat profit margins? Yours are razor thin, because screw the competition. There product has an industrial design comes in black and ugly grey, you have designer colors, because screw the competition.
If you are a multi-billion dollar company, and you have the resources to do everything better than anyone else in the field, then you either perform at that level, or you lose.
The iPhone launch was to be a tour de force of this ideology.
"They have ugly plastic buttons sticking out everywhere, we have metal and glass. They have a crappy joke of a keyboard, we'll reinvent the entire idea of an on screen keyboard. They have a shitty sales experience in stores? We'll partner with one carrier, and train the living daylights out of their sales people. Their UI is hard to use? We'll launch a world wide ad campaign where we show subtly people how to use the device during the ad."
I was at MS at the time. The idea there was "We'll let our OEM partners decide on how best to differentiate their product, they are after all the ones doing the main value ad and we rely on them for manufacturing."
Apple said screw that entire model, they just made it themselves, and they made it amazing.
There is an incredible energy on teams motivated by the ethos of doing the best and steam rolling the competition through sheer excellence. I'm not advocating for dirty business practices, but holy hell, telling your engineers "do good enough" is going to get you "good enough." When they wake up and go to work and the entire office is saying "we're going to make a product that puts everyone else to shame", you get a great product.
Microsoft poured money into game tools since the 90s, published a large library of in-house games themselves, litigated and demolished it's competition (both Apple and Linux), and courted every single hardware manufacturer in existence. XBox as a console came into being from this massive investment.
> because Apple refuses to licence their operating system for non-Apple hardware
Reminder that Microsoft poached Bungie, who developed Marathon and others exclusively for Macintosh, to develop Halo for PC and XBox exclusive releases.
>their actions show a great deal of respect towards the ingenuity of console hackers, because if they didn't, they would've never bothered to do such an effort thwarting them.
dude. The irony. They bricked our machines and joked about it. They had a fellowship with the FBI.
They (MS and EA) threw OP, the author of this fkn submission, in jail.
Their own Terms of Service and Policy Enforcement page still brags about "pwning the pwnrs" - to this day.
Make no mistake, MS and Xbox still hate us. It's just from a capitalist perspective, its hard to compete with losing PC audience.
Their only selling point is itself, an unhackable console.
They did have restraint. There is a list of console ID's hardcoded in every NAND because originally a few souls had reversed the NAND enough to RSA-sign CON files - they were just gonna ban everyone who had made modified content, but didnt... because of Halo3's File Share incidentally preserving personal RSA keys, making it difficult to reconcile modified content, once spread.
Regarding hacked DVD drives....they did the math and banned millions when it was profitable, ironically.
Xbox nearly died in development, as Bill Gates was none too pleased with the decision. Fries recalls Microsoft's "Valentine's Day Massacre" in which Bill Gates furiously ripped apart the development team for circumventing his original idea.
https://gamerant.com/bill-gates-xbox-story/
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