How Microsoft defeated Sony.

[twesterm]

WereKitten said:

S.T.A.G.E. said:

WereKitten said:

twesterm said:

ymeaga1n said:

Shanobi said:
Microsoft sold the last xbox at a loss, too. That didn't help them last gen.

Sony pretty well defeated themselves, and Nintendo put the stake in them. If there were no X-box 360 this generation, things would still look about exactly the same as they do for Sony. They'd be lagging in sales versus the PS2, and getting thwomped by the Wii.

Really, Microsoft has done absolutely zip this generation to take Sony out of it's first place spot.

True. But MS has done absolutely everything this generation to take sony out of it's 2nd place spot.

 

Microsoft is doing well this gen because they've done just about everything right.  The only negative of the 360 really is the RRoD (which is a big thing for a lot of people) but now they've even taken care of that.

Whether they were specifically targeting Sony or not, they deserve their 2nd place this gen.

 

There's no such thing as "deserving" in the market. You don't gain karma points by making good games and giving good services. You sell what you sell, by using whatever means you choose to employ. A self-fulfilling prophecy if you want.

So you're saying there is no such thing as marketing psychology? Karma is based upon the rule of inevitable results. Based on that logic...I would definitely have to question yours.

In this sense each and every item on the market "deserves" its sales in a tautological way, or none does in the truest sense of the word.

Products are given to their market at prices based on the wishes of the business minds behind them. This can have a positive or negative outcome.

MS lost money by entering the console market and willingly did so, because they wanted to gain a slice of the upcoming media delivery and service market. The same trend shift that is threatening and will reduce their importance in the OS and application market gave them reason to do so.

Microsoft wont lose importance of their OS.They currently have a monopoly which constantly has class action lawsuits after it. They day Microsoft doesn't antagonize a suits for monopolization of the OS market is the day they play fair ball. Just as Sony is a conglomerate focusing on Sony Pictures, Sony electronics and more, Microsoft can do just as they please. These are two well able corporations. Microsoft still is more powerful.

 

They are succeeding in their goal: their greatest victory is the penetration of Live and the Netflix kind of deal. If they will have to go all casual next gen to keep striving towards their real goal, they will.

Microsoft wants the casuals just like Sony does. It's a smart plan if they want to make the most that they can. The 720 will be an amazing system. The only reason the 360 had the problems it had was because of rushing the launch.

 

 

PS: do you have any evidence that the latest 360 hardware iteration have fallen inline with the average failure rates for similar electronic products (less than 1%)?

Microsoft has figured out the definite reason and cure for RROD. There was a news report about it on Yahoo.com when I was at school a couple weeks ago. I can't really find the report, but i'll try to find it (I need some sleep). The Jasper edition of the Xbox 360 fixed the mass majority of RROD. Really RROD is a distant memory to alot of people.

 

 

You missed most points.

1) my point was that expressing in terms of "company X did well so it deserves its sales, even though this lesser issue exists" is unfit to an economic analysis. "Deserving" is a moral term, by which we think that somebody gained merit to a reward through his/her actions. In moral terms, we even go to the length of saying that someone might have a reward that he does not "deserve", or that he did not have a reward he might "deserve".

But in capitalistic economy you always get the sales that you deserve, because sales are the only measure of how good you did. That includes innovation, research, marketing, charity foundations,corruption and pointing guns at the head of clients. Moral has nothing to do with it, and we should try to not think about economy in the way we judge the actions of people.

2) Microsoft' OS and enterprise offering _is_ being threatened by alternative offers and the software as service /web applications trend. This has nothing to do with Sony... it has to do with Linux and Google. Still it means that they want to adapt to the new trends.

3) Microsoft and any technician who opened a faulty 360 _always knew_ the cause of the RROD. It's not like a long-standing misterious fault  nobody was able to find. It was about the cramped design causing the board to warp and the bad soldering to come loose. It was just more economically viable to extend then guarantee to three years for RROD and replace a lot of units than to redesign completely the hardware to fix it for good.

One has even to wonder if the 33% fault rate of the very first batch was not known _before_ the launch and the whole thing was just a calculated risk. Rushing to the market alot before Sony to gain mindshare against having to deal with faluty hardware six to twelve months later.

Lower heat-producing components were introduced in each iteration, but I still don't see links to statistics showing the fault rate for jasper.

 

 

I'm not talking about Karma, I'm talking about Microsoft did things right so it makes sense that they do well.  If you make smart business decisions you can generally expect to do well.

And as for going into the console race with a lose, console manufactures have been doing that since back in the NES days.  That is nothing new.