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ArnoldRimmer said:
What a meaningless statement.

Fact is:
Adam Orth may not be an "official spokesperson" for Microsoft, but that doesn't mean he's lying. In the end, he's still Creative Director at Microsoft, so if one believes what he said was just utter bullshit, the inevitable question remains: Then why did he say so?

Personally, I find it rather hard to believe that he has simply fantasized and there's not the slightest truth to what he says, putting his own job in big danger by publically spreading complete lies under his real identity.

His statements on the always-online policy must come from somewhere, and I see two possible explanations:
- Adam Orth was really absolutely convinced that the Xbox 720 will be always online, which would strongly suggest that Microsoft indeed planned to take that path (but after seeing the public reactions, Microsoft might now reconsider this)

- Microsoft did indeed think about always-online, but they didn't decide yet, for they realized how unpopular and thus dangerous for their business such a move could be. Adam Orth's statements were a kind of "test-balloon" to see peoples reaction - if the idea would have been accepted, it would be implemented, but if people would protest, Microsoft would simply be able to say something like: "Hey, he's not an official spokesperson, we really don't know how such bizarre ideas could even come to his mind!" (In that case, I'd personally still expect a more professional and less arrogant approach though)

The fact that in the statement they are saying absolutely nothing on the actual topic speaks for itself. Microsoft definitely wants to go that way - but we might not see that feature in the Xbox 720 already, because Microsoft may realize that people are still too strong against it. Eventually this might mean that the Xbox 720 gets delayed, because they may have already designed the Xbox 720 to be always-online and in that case going back would probably involve drastic changes.


I do not see why its so hard for people to understand that MS will not speak about anything nextBox related until they actually REVEAL the console.  This not a very hard concept to understand.  Just because the net want answers is not going to make MS change their plans or release any info until they are ready.  

I higly doubt that MS only made the console for always online as that would be a silly design.  As someone noted before, its probably something that can be easily patched in or out.

The Adam Orth being the scapegoat for MS to see what the reation of Only Online console doesn't sound like a good plan.  Instead MS would have used a 3rd party outlet to test the waters instead of an employee at MS.  It's even less plausible if the employee was rude and commented in a way that makes MS look bad.  I would probably buy that Ideal if the guy only had reasonable dicussions about online only instead of statements that are designed to piss people off.

The key is that it doesn't matter what MS is testing as far as always online or what the dev units are setup to do, its the actual consumer product that matters.  I can definitely see MS making the dev units online only because they want to track those devs, what they do and who they are.  A consumer device is something totally different