exciting stuff, can't wait to see what comes of it

Office for Xbox? Sold!

I hope MS has the stones to keep the name Cortana for it's siri competitor and doesn't fall back to the 'tell me' moniker. I would love to say 'Cortana, plot me a course to the zoo' to fire up the sat nav when I take the kids out.

hmm i wonder how this will effect Orleans

Well That was the plan from the get go... The question was when and how... It is crazy how MS jacked up their release cycle the past year+
this is something that could greatly beneficiate the company in term of marketing and corporate image... With MS having new stuff to talk about/advertise almost every quarters across their different businesses...

Microsoft's new cloud programming model is called Orleans and has been in development for a few years. It organizes units of computation and storage as "grains" that can seemlessly migrate between datacenters. It ensures consistency and replication. It manages debugging, performance monitoring, deployment, configuration and maintenance. It's simple(incredibly important). It uses .NET languages which are easy enough to teach an elementary school kid in a week, yet robust enough to have developed some of the world's most complex enterprise software.

its basicly increasing synergy effects, if im understanding this correctly

My guess is if they went this route they would allow you to customize it.

So by default it would be, "<Brand> do something", but users would be able to personalize it.  So, I might have "Bitch Play Fast and Furious." and you might have "Cortana Play Fast and Furious."

Considering Xbox One users are already asking to be able to personalize voice commands, I wouldn't be surprised if that becomes a feature in the future.

It also could get consumers into a very fractured environment as with Andriod. 

One of the great things about Windows XP was the long life and support that the OS got.  New features were added into and onto it, rather than the OS being replaced every few years. 

It also was great for corporations.  I integrate an OS into my environment, and the only thing I have to worry about managing over the long-term are application and system updates.  Not entirely new OSes that may have new hardware requirements.

For companies that routinely rotated hardware, a long OS cycle reduced the pain and allowed hardware rotation to be natural and top-down, which often makes sense.  However, when you're routinely updating the OS because of significant hardware requirement changes, it makes it a little more challenging.

The hurdle from XP to Vista is the reason why Vista was so unsuccessful in the enterprise.  However, in the few years that Vista was out, the hardware prices dropped enough that companies that normally upgraded their hardware naturally had already begun to transition in hardware compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7.  Making the transition to Windows 7 easier. 

That isn't even beginning to address the application issues, but Windows 7 also addressed them better with XP Mode and Virtualization.

Completely off-topic but check your messages kowenicki!

OP: Should mean a lot of content being shared across all platforms, Xbox especially. 

But not while you're driving. Might end up in a tree or something.

Now this is why I want an Xbox One over a PS4. The Xbox One can end up as a sick media box. Hopefully the next CEO will push as hard as Ballmer did.

Imagine a Word (as in office) that you could dictate to, saying stuff to your kinect and the kinect writes it down for you... Probably not possible with todays kinect, but next gen kinect may be accurate enough.