Nat Brown, one of the founding members of the Xbox team within Microsoft, absolutely eviscerates the current direction of the product:
My gripe is that, as usual, Microsoft has jumped its own shark and is out stomping through the weeds planning and talking about far-flung future strategies in interactive television and original programming partnerships with big dying media companies when their core product, their home town is on fire, their soldiers, their developers, are tired and deserting, and their supply-lines are broken.
And:
Microsoft is living in a naive dream-world. I have heard people still there arguing that the transition of the brand from hardcore gamers to casual users and tv-uses was an intentional and crafted success. It was not. It was an accident of circumstance that Microsoft is neither leveraging nor in control of.
And:
Apple, if it chooses to do so, will simply kill Playstation, Wii-U and xBox by introducing an open 30%-cut app/game ecosystem for Apple-TV. I already make a lot of money on iOS – I will be the first to write apps for Apple-TV when I can, and I know I’ll make money.
Read the whole thing. My sense is that Brown is dead-on. Microsoft “won” that last round of the console wars, but that may actually hurt and not help them. Because what they think most users will want is actually just an illusion — a reflection of the past.
The next Xbox sounds like a great power gamer machine, but what if the real competition is not the Playstation or the Wii-U, but the as-yet-untapped Apple TV running iOS games?
I was an Xbox fan for a long time — I owned three different models until I finally got fed up with all the quirks of the software (some of which Brown addresses in his post) and threw the thing out the window. The new Xbox should have been released at least two years ago. Microsoft rested on their laurels for too long. Now they have to hope Apple doesn’t release an SDK for the Apple TV before they unveil the new Xbox.
Looking forward to reading the original post, but I’ll just say this about MG’s “The new Xbox should have been released at least two years ago.” line:
Nope.
New hardware in the middle of the recovery? No way, Jose. Two years ago they launched Kinect and they sold OODLES of those.
M$ may still lose the crown in the next console cycle… but I’d bet on Valve/Steam before I bet on Apple: and I’m someone who is tied DEEP into the Apple ecosystem and has no love of Steam.
