[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-02-peter-moore-rec...
He made XBox customers happy with the added extended warranty but it cost MS over $1 billion, so he was ousted. From another perspective, one can also blame him for rushing out the 360 too early, but then that's how MS was able to gain market share at the expense of both Sony (temporarily) and Nintendo.
And Nintendo. It pains me to see such the company that brought me so many wonderful memories (still does) get turned into a minor console player. Thanks Zeus they have the DS.
I was 11 years old when the first Halo game came out, and I got the original XBox/Halo for Christmas that same year.
Before that, I was playing Final Fight on Sega CD. So going from that to Halo was a real eye opener. I had never experienced emotion like that in a video game before. The music was EPIC, the story line was immersive, and the graphics were excellent for the time.
Halo is considered (by me) to be the first game of the new era. Sure, there were other successful "3D" FPS games that were out before Halo, but the original Halo hit all the marks and was the first taste of modern gaming for a lot of people. Many of my friends went from playing Mario/Sonic/etc... straight to Halo. It represented a massive leap in graphics quality, so much so that even games of today don't look _much_ better than Halo to me.
Halo is the only reason I purchased an XBox 360 and XBox One.
I see the Xbox One is pretty bad, too, and this "ads everywhere" has leaked into Windows 10 (though you can turn them off a bit).
Where? I've been using Windows 10 everyday for months and haven't seen an ad. There was that one time that something resembling a Tomb Raider ad was served to users' lock screens, but I never saw it myself and I've never seen anything else.
Maybe it depends on which version of Windows 10?
I think there's pop-ups for Office as well as pre installed "apps" that are just links to buy.
Analyzing my experience, the out of band warranty extension is a feature of an underlying value Microsoft placing on gaming. It's not just that the repairs were the right way to make something that was going to suck suck less. It's that the core proposition of the Xbox 360 was that the experience of using it would keep getting better and that it would get better because games would get better. Playing FIFA 16 is better than playing FIFA 12 was better than playing FIFA 07.
Beyond that, the software keeps getting better because Microsoft values developers. They're not all just share croppers who pay 30% to enter a downward race toward ninety-nine cents.
[1] 8 cheeseheads, a tube of thermal paste, and a sheet of .070. aluminum from the hobby shoppe.
To be fair: The Elites that came about later on were a MASSIVE improvement. The originals were the low bidder manufacturer and it showed, and I think M$ learned from that. Despite it's software issues (which I've gone to at length in other threads) the One does feel like solid hardware and good build quality.
Typing this from my android phone.
Microsoft Lumia owner and fan
- The Update system was extremely confusing, I had a hell of a time just figuring out how to update to 8.1, including needing a firmware update, figuring out how to apply a firmware update, then doing it three times over because I had that many. While the system eventually notified me of the system update, it remained silent on the firmware.
- The UI language was fantastic, seriously I loved the way the phone handles information. The only issue there is that many apps like Facebook and what have you totally ignored it, and Microsoft let them on anyway. What good is building a UI like that if you're going to let the developers just do whatever they want anyway?
- The app store in general is extremely limited. I realize Microsoft can't do anything here but I'm holding them partially responsible because of how late they were to this game.
- My Icon would get very hot with only regular use. A quick flip through twitter or even just some websites and the back of the device became uncomfortably warm.
- The keyboard is AMAZING. Seriously Microsoft knocked it out of the park on that one.
- The device felt well built and (aside of the heat issues) never presented as though it was poorly made. Connectors were solid, battery life was very good, and the bright colored interfaces with the white-on-black text make it genuinely a pleasure to use.
Eventually I had to face reality and bail (too limited on capabilities, plus I'm an iOS developer and at the time they just released the 6, the first decently sized iPhone) and went that way. That said should I change careers I'd definitely look the Windows Phone way again.
The current situation is laughable. Existing devices in this space are designed as standalone items, which may or may not even be meant to integrate with other devices. The "standards" that have been brought to life thus far are... ugh. Just no!
I will be satisfied the day I can turn every wall into a touch display, with wireless speakers everywhere. Every lightbulb, every speaker, every appliance, every goddamn little thing seamlessly integrated into one beautiful system. No push-and-pull of different standards trying to fight for a place in my home. No separate apps on a stupid smartphone depending on what I want to control.
Microsoft's example with wanting to be the "home media center" is such an insignificantly tiny part of the whole puzzle. A TV and a set-top box gets me nothing of what I want for the future. They only have their eyes set on media consumption, what you will pay for to download and watch/play on their stupid service. It has nothing to do with actually being the center of your home, only the center of your living room spending habits.
I'm so disappointed with how slowly things are moving along. Computing is still in its infancy, and we haven't really advanced very far at all. We need a few true visionaries and inventors to come along and make things start to happen. So far, we've got nothing worthy of being called amazing.
tldr; I don't want a home media center. I want Jarvis dammit. Actually, I want more than Jarvis. And fuck 4K TV; I want to skip ahead to 1024K wall surfaces that you can look at with a fkn microscope and not tell the difference between a display and reality. ;)
Have you ever read Bill Gates' The Road Ahead? The book hasn't aged well, of course. (To put its age in perspective, it was a big deal that it launched with an accompanying Multimedia CD-ROM.) But a large gist of the book is exactly that point that technology will (and should) drift into the foundations of the home, seamlessly touching nearly every device and surface in the home. Most of the details are obsolete by now, but I do think the overall vision is still inspiring. (Even to this day, Microsoft keeps and updates a "smart home" concept for PR usage that they can play act what a seamlessly integrated supere home may be.)
Things are moving slowly because they have to. It's been 20 years since The Road Ahead was published (!). There's a sense that if Microsoft had found some magic way to jump straight to whole home automation and seamless device linking in those 20 years they would have jumped on it.
The interesting thing is that even in the world we have you can see that DNA threaded through their efforts. The Xbox is the TV set top box that succeeded after multiple, multiple attempts at Microsoft before they found that the intersection of Games and Media Center was the way to get into that space.
The 360 tried to extend your media center from a home media server you probably didn't own. The Xbox One tries to extend itself, your Xbox and its access to your TV, to every Windows 10 device you probably do own... Yes, Xboxen have to standalone as game playing warriors on the threshold of your television, but you can see Microsoft trying, however successful you think they may be, to expand that deeper into your house...
Then there's other "standalone" pieces of the puzzle that have been R&D efforts and direct learning experiences. Kinect put a UX R&D lab in a bunch of people's living rooms. There's no HoloLens without Kinect, and HoloLens too has that DNA of trying to get to a place where everything in your space (not just house, but maybe even your office) is seamlessly digital. There's Cortana very much trying to be your day-to-day Jarvis, at least for appointment scheduling and reminders today.
The reason I ramble down this tangent with you, is that the interesting thing today, that I don't think you appreciate given your opening paragraph, is the difference between what Microsoft wants these days, versus what Apple and Google are trying. Some of it comes from the maturity of thinking about all of this stuff for more than two decades already (and building many, many baby steps toward it) combined with fresh executive leadership. Microsoft has backed away again from trying to build "the Microsoft Home" and is content to once again be in a place similar to where the company started (and those bits of DNA that remain from The Road Ahead). Microsoft wants you to have an awesome home, regardless of which devices you choose to use, but they want those devices to be full of Microsoft software and connected to Microsoft's cloud. They don't mind being exclusive again, they seem to want to be the company you come to for the best apps and the best tools to develop your own apps.
The Xbox One wants to extend itself to every Windows 10 device that you already own, as well as Android and iOS. The Xbox app is installed by default for home Windows 10 users to make it easy; it's just an app store download away on the other platforms. Cortana wants to extend "herself" to every Windows 10 device that you already own, as well as Android and iOS. Again, Cortana is there by default in every Windows 10 install, but available for Android and iOS, too.
I cannot tell you if this New Microsoft will be any more successful at making our homes amazing seamlessly integrated, beautiful systems, than the Old Microsoft, but I'm willing to bet that they might be, and I'm willing to hope that it will be faster than another 20 years away as so many of the puzzle pieces start to come together (Xbox integration with Cortana; Better cross-device Cortana "hand off"; "Cloud Notifications" merging all of your device notifications and dismissal; ...), and maybe much, much faster than your pessimistic 30-50 year horizon...
«So far, we've got nothing worthy of being called amazing.»
Per Gibson's Law, "The future is already here, it is unevenly distributed" is the corollary that "The things we have today seem ordinary and boring, as we forget that they are really the future, distributed to us today". There are technologies we take for granted today that make the "big amazing future" things proposed and explored in The Road Ahead seem quaint by comparison. Sometimes we forget to stop and appreciate how amazingly the bits of future that we have that are already here.
Basically, the console brand, to MS and Sony, is ultimately a tool that can be used to build a potentially bigger empire. Share and revenue prospects come before whether the experience makes sense, and in the echo chambers of such large companies, it's easy to fashion a story where every consumer is hungry for all of this stuff and wants a single source to deliver it.
I will never buy Microsoft hardware again, ever.
So, yeah, that is definitely a factor in my case.
all my friends that do have PS4s got them for 'free' when buying a new TV.