*dramatic music* What could those engineers at Microsoft be up to? The Q3 results for the company’s financial performance are in, and we have noticed what may have gone unnoticed!
Aside from the expected (Halo: Reach raking in $350 million in two weeks, 2.8 million Xbox 360 consoles selling in the three month period, etc.), it was revealed that the Xbox brand was responsible for nearly a quarter of the 1.8 billion revenue that the Entertainment & Devices division of Microsoft raked in.
What was even more interesting was the fact that in the past 3 months, R&D expenses had risen significantly. This could mean many things.
Microsoft’s motion sensing Kinect peripheral is on the way, and it could be that the costs were incurred developing and finalizing the hardware. What makes this an unlikely scenario is that R&D costs as this significant cannot be attributed to a product that has been finalized, nearly finished and is now being marketed to the masses. It could mean that Microsoft has some fancy new technology on the way. Could it be a slimmer console? 3D display tech? The 3rd Xbox? Who knows. What we do know is that a lot of money was recently blown developing something. And we’ll be keeping an eye on the Q4 reports to see if there really is something cooking up there in Redmond.
http://techspotlight.net/news/microsoft-rd-burns-65-million-in-three-months-on-something-unknown
