$15,000,000,000+ versus $380,000,000

Clearly Sony is close LOL.

Lets think for a minute.  MS has spent almost 2 billion on 2 datacenters this year alone.  This is more than Sony has made in profits for the last 10 years.  Its not that MS is GOD like or anything of the sort.  Its the fact that they are investing in this area on a scale that Sony cannot compete. 

You are proving the point.

Kowen said:

"Building from the ground up?

It's the other way around.  I simply dont see how Sony can have the infrastructure for a competent online service like this, if demand is very high.

MS unquestionably has the infrastructure and keeps on adding.  they announced about another $4bn spend on data centres in the last few months alone."

Kowen is making the point that MS' infrastructure on Cloud is where it needs to be, and because Sony has not invested as much, and is getting outpaced, then it will not be a competant service. That is what he is saying in this quote whether he meant to or not.

Iamdeath and myself are challenging this statement.

You are agreeing. MS having HUGE resources put into cloud :

a) does not mean their xbox cloud service is further ahead.
b) Does not mean their xbox cloud is better
c) does not mean that Sony's gaikai is not competant for the purposes aforementioned.

Why? Because
a) Having more invested in a company-wide cloud system does not inherently mean apps and services are yet developed for the xb1. One is hardware and one is software.
b) Having more invested in servers only means that you are capable of running MORE and delivering MORE content. As a correction, the POTENTIAL is far better, but again, hardware and software are not the same thing.
c) Because Sony may have exactly enough for what it requires. Sony doesn't need to have 500k servers to make a sandwich, if you catch my drift.

@Bolded: At least 300,000 servers which is the number they stated.  

@2nd Bolded:  Pure opinion.  First we need to define what a cloud service is because making such a statement means you do not understand the basic principles.  First the Cloud is a combination of many different services.  These services are there weather someone use them or not and capacity is the cloud ability to handle load.  Azure is MS cloud platform that supports many different cloud services.  Saas, Iaas and Paas.  Azure already runs a lot of XBL and MS has been moving most if not all of the services over to Azure for the X1.

What does this mean.  This means that the X1 runs on the same platform as all of MS other business.  It can leverage as much or as little of the complete cloud platform MS has at this time.  Do you know how Azure works, it spins up and down resources depending on what the customer has purchased.  So when MS says they are providing 300.000 servers for XBl for the X1, they mean they have reserved within their Azure infrastructure 300,000 server resources.  Its not marketing spin, its how the system works.  MS just spent 700 million on a new datacenter for capacity to support XBL and Office 365.

@3rd Bolded:  This statement shows you do not know how MS cloud or Azure works. MS can add capacity at a drop of a hat.  They can ship whole datacenters to a location in hours.  Azure can add or remove resources, reserve resources and dynamically re purpose resources at a drop of a pin.  MS does not have to use all of their resources just for XBL, the software they use allows Azure to do all the work.  This is the flaw in your argument.  MS is using what they already have because the  system can easily handle the load from XBL and MS is leveraging their investment which total in the billions to include XBL with the Azure platform. 

I believe there is a misconception on cloud service and more important to this discussion MS Azure platform.  People believe its just a combination of a bunch of servers to serve up content but thats just one service out of 3.  MS cloud service does way more than streaming, it does all of the different cloud services and the cornerstone of those services is the software that makes it all work together.  The software that allows Azure to spin up and down resources to allocate resources at a moment notice, to distribute resoruces locally to a requestor.

One of the new platforms MS created is called Orleans.  Orleans allows MS or any developer to create cloud based applications that can distribute their work across many different servers at one time.  Combine this with Azure ability to spin up resources locally to the requestor, you have a service that can increase the quality of service when streaming content to a user. 

What I am stating is that MS has a complete cloud solution that allows them to leverage the complete ability of their Azure services to deliever content to users locally. The closer you are to a datacenter the lower your ping times and thus the faster the respone will be for game streaming.  This is a pure numbers type of game couple with an advance software cloud service.

When both services go online, it will not be the one that started first that gets the nod from gamers, it will be the one that present the best quality of service.  The service that has the best quality in picture and the lowest pings to present a more responsive game.  MS has the advantage in that they can leverage Azure capacity and ability to spin up resources local to the user with Orleans ability to spread out processing to deliver a better picture.

@ Bolded: Enough to do what.  Sony and MS operate on a global scale not a basement.  The quality of the service will definitely be impacted if Sony does not have enough server to serve content locally. Why do you think Sony is only doing the US, Its capacity.  Even if MS release a year later but have the capacity to present a much better quality of service because they can serve up content locally to everyone in the US and internatioanlly is a huge advantage.

You are basing your opinion that MS just started yesterday on their game streaming service.  Thats a fallacy in your argument.  Who knows how long MS has been working on their streaming service.  Just because you are hearing about it now does not mean the service haven't been worked on.  The Orleans cloud platform only got leaked this year and MS was working on that for 3 years.

Are you reading the same thead? No one is saying that...Maybe stay on topid?

I am not sure you even understand what people are saying and what you're replying to. Someone posed a question about how ready MS would be, someone correctly pointed out MS is actually much more invested and well versed in cloud technology than Sony. That, of course, sent alarms going off in your bunker so you came running to defend Sony's honor, as if someone was attacking them. I mean, look at your first reply ITT. Defending something that wasn't even an attack, but more like a honest opinion based on actual facts.

It's not really an attack just because you take it as one.

MS is a company that gets 20 + billion a year in revenue, xbox is such a miniscule of that, these servers are for MS as a whole, how much of these get leveraged for xbox is going to be small. It is business common sense. MS is not going to spend billions for cloud on a part of their business they never have ever turned a profit on, and many investors have said they should just drop.

This 300 K servers  nonsense, is simply PR, most of that would be in place for windows and other business services, not gaming which is in the grand scheme of things almost nothing to MS.

Nothing else yoy say has an facts or even has anything to do with the topic.

Nowhere has there been any advantage for MS becaus eof this, and gamers won't see much of one either. Cloud for gaming is simply a myth at this point. Sony has no trouble givving services that gamers want, the cloud doesn';t pose much of any advantage for MS.  Cloud is not a MS only thing BTW. By the time cloud is much bigger for gaming? It won't be this generation of consoles. Cloud is the future, not close to the present.

So many "technicians" here only talking about stuff they don't know about :) Impressive how agenda makes people to experts while knowing *nothing* about what needs to be in order for a good streaming service. No matter what, MS already has a big cloud service already running. Now. To try out for everyone. This has nothing to do with what they would be able to do with their streaming service but the infrastucture is ready *now*. data centers, serves, contracts with peerings, everything. Now Sony has to show us what they are able to do and I hope it will be 2014. I hope 2014 is also for Europe, everything else would mean they bought a service which was never ready in Europe for masses.

This is not how Azure works. Azure allocates resources on demand.  MS stated they are reserving 300,000 server worth or resources for XBL.  There is no reason for MS to lie about this since they have the capacity and have spent the money and continue to spend the money.  You are trying to tell people what MS will and will not do, but MS is already showing with their pocket book that they mean business.  The part you are not understanding is the fact that MS doesn't have to have resources just waiting for XBL.  Azure has the ability to dynamically allocate resources when needed.  This is the main reason Azure is a more complete cloud infrastructure and service than Gaikai.  MS building their cloud infrastructure doesn't just benefit XBL, it benefits their entire business.  As you stated, XBL is a small part of the total investment for MS cloud datacenters.  The capacity to service XBL, including all the other service they do will not be a blip on their network bandwidth.

You are making an argument that MS will not spend billions on datacenters just for XBl.  Well Duh, of course they will not. MS doesn't have to because those servers will be used for their entire business and XBL will be one of them.  A true cloud service allocates resources when needed, those resources do not have to be sitting there wasting money.  The way Azure works, is that you have a application.  You tell MS how that application should work and what resources should be available.  In simple terms, this means that if only one person is using your App only one resource needed for that one person is used.  When 10 come on line, Azures allocate more resources.  If the amount of people drop to 5, then Azure frees up the resources used for 10.  Azure does not count servers but instead virtual resources because the service does not depend on servers.  A resource can be running on one server and someone could pull the switch and the user would never know the difference because Azure replicates all process depending on the service contract.  This is the reason Azure can promote 100% up-time for customers.

As to what I stated having nothing to do with the topic, I guess it went over your head. Let me break it down to you.  The topic is Rio, game streaming service from MS.  I explained how Azure works to provide steaming locally to users using the service.  Because Azure dynamically spin up servers, MS can leverage their huge capacity to provide a server closer to the user thus improving ping times and performance.   I explained how Orleans allows MS to create distributed cloud based applications.  This means instead of having one server in one location processing a game, instead MS has the ability to use any number of servers to process the game thus improving image quality.  One of the biggest parts to the image quality of the service is creating the video stream to the user. multiple servers crunching on the video compression will be much faster than one.