| pokoko said: Mattrick gets all the blame from most but this had to be something the top people approved of, at the very least. Possibly they even mandated some of the alternate revenue streams, like the TV emphasis. We might never know. |
I agree he probably wasn't the only decision maker involved. The real problem with trying to push blame any higher up is that none of those people would have ever really had a conversation about the impacts to system performance(assuming MS really knew themselves until it was too late) and overall looks and costs. I would think that it was presented as "we can have box A that is vanilla and costs us $420 each or Box B that does all of these amazing things with Kinect and cost us $490".
The pitch would have been that "box B has a market of 50% of the population and box A only has 30%. So, even if we lose 15-25% of the buyers that will only buy box A, we still have way more buyers with box B. Not to mention that box B buyers will now enter our ecosystem and buy movies and services that will make us more $$$ per box sold by 2-3 times!!!"
Most people discount the Kinect now, as it turned out to be a little late to the market doing what it does. Had it come 2 years earlier, it would have been an easier sell as it would have been alone in the market for what it did. Now of course, it is funny that just about anythin in your home can be bought with voice recognition. Just look at the Amazon Alexa/echos and the google systems, and the apple one that is coming soon to.
It is near the end of the end....
