| Machiavellian said: Do you know what a program director is. Basically its a marketing position. Most would consider his postion as a community manager. Only Larry made a statement that he would soon regret since it was a knee jerk reaction. I am sure a lot of you have done something like that before or answered a question you did not fully know the correct answer. Phil statements were right in line with the perception of how MS feels about Kinect and multiple people answered the same way when asked the same question so his words can be considered as a directive on Kinect. We still do not know the exact commitment that MS has concerning Kinect but we do know its direction is now different. @Bolded: No what I am saying is that people F up. It happens a lot but only people who want to confirm their opinion only take one statement as a communication or stance for a whole company. Usually when something is a directive from a corporation, you will have confirming statements from all parties. You will have official statements that have gone through a number of different channels for clarification. When you only have one person making a statement that is not backed by others within the company then its mostly an opinion. Sometimes its informed sometimes its not. Are you telling me that people no matter the postion do not make incorrect statements or make a guess that can be wrong? THis is my point. I do not weigh the direction or stance of a company from one employee if not backed by a official statement or stance from the people who actually make the decisions. I do not have an agenda to torch Sony, Nintendo or MS over tweet comments or one off comments made at trade shows or conferences. I have no agenda to confirm why I like Sony more than MS or Nintendo. I really just do not think that way Maybe I have more experience in this situation. I worked Tech Support, trade shows, conferences, training classes etc. I know how it can be when asked questions you do not really know the answer or the corporate stance. In my early days I use to give my educated guess and got burned a few times because it was wrong. Now when I do not know the answer I pretty much just tell people I will find out. Some people get mad with that answer expecting you to know everything but as some people have mentioned policy change a lot especially when competition is tight. |
I really don't understand why you are so vehemently defending the XBox executives. Is it so hard, and so unbelievable to you, to actually entertain the notion that they were doing all that on purpose? That they purposely said everything they did, that they purposely tried to push an anti-gamer agenda which would only suit their bottom line?
Because, honestly, even if I were an XBox supporter, it would be easier for me to believe that, than to believe that they are a bunch of incompetent buffoons who were just speaking random bullshit.
I cannot believe that any of those people (Mattrick, Nelson/Hryb, Harrison, Spencer, Pennello etc.) managed to rise to the very top of the hierarchy of one of the best, largest, most profitable corporations in the entire world, while at the same time being complete and utter clueless idiots.
That for those 30 days in May-June of 2013, the biggest crunch time in the past decade, when they knew the entire global press will be focused on them, when they were preparing several years for the launch of what should have been the most profitable hardware product of Microsoft's history, which would bury Sony for good by taking over huge chunks of EU market, they were so stupid and moronic that they could not prepare themselves to answer several questions on the most basic specifications of their console.
The entire console was based on DRM, Kinect, always-on, sports, TV, exclusive games and original programming. That's not a lot of data for college educated high-level executives to remember.
Sure, I concede that it could have been embarassing had the press asked Hryb how many condensers or transistors the console has, had they asked whether it uses 54 or 45 Watts of electricity when in stand-by, or some extremely minute and unimportant detail. But to claim that they were unprepared to explain 5 basic concepts of their new console - that seems to me very unlikely.
So I don't accept those defences, I don't believe they were so vastly incompetent to answer a few questions about very major features of their new console. It is much more believable, and definitely closer to the truth, that they wer doing all that on purpose, hoping that their half-assed explanations will not garner any criticism and that the public will accept it and move on.
