Are you implying that the Xbox will someday make more money than their Windows/Office line? Are you saying that they will come even remotely close to it? Doing a quick google gives me the numbers for Q1 of 2009. $167mil for their EDD devision, and $3.8bil for their Client devision. Here I'll do the math for you. For each percent of sales they give up from the OS/Office income, their EDD division needs to increase by 25%. Having a console will NEVER be as common as having a PC because all consoles do are entertainment. Meanwhile the best jobs in the world, literally THE BEST, require a PC. So no I'm sorry. Consoles lose and Microsoft is fucking up majorly here.

Good move. MS needs more real 360 exclusives and not just console exclusives.

I think he's implying that the xbox can become a big part off their revenue and company just like the playstation is for sony not that it will overtake their core os and software business.

More or less right. By promoting gaming on the 360 more than the PC (one of the few true incentives to use WIndows over alternatives), they will certainly lose some marketshare of their OS/Office profits. The question is if they will make it up with their EDD profits. As I said earlier, a 1% drop in their Client division would have to have the EDD go up by 25% for it to balance out. Somehow I don't think that will happen at all.

Exactly...and it was cheap too,considering the time it took Alan Wake to finally...awake

If you choose well supported HW, Ubuntu is very easy. Preinstalled it would be even easier. I know people who "opens the Internet" (if not even "opens Facebook", or another site they prefer) and they don't even know they arte using IE to browse... A friend of my sister's had her IE messed up, she did understand so little I couldn't do anything by phone, then an ex-bf of my sister, who happened to having seen her PC and what programs she had, told her to just launch FF instead of IE (not knowing she already had it, I didn't dare to suggest her by phone to install it). She wasn't very happy because she had a handy icon directly launching IE on FBK so that she hadn't to type the address, I told her to just tell FF to save the session when she closed it (it was really impossible by phone to have her make that icon or create another icon to directly launch FF on FBK) and all was solved, although in a suboptimal way.

For people like that, preinstallation, just like it happens for Windows, an icon to directly open FBK, another for Google, one for the mail, and they otfen use web mail, and little else would be enough to making them not notice whether they are using an OS or another.

About gaming on PC: DOS was big in gaming when in consoles world only Nintendo was surviving, Windows 3.x was an absolute dwarf, but it ran on DOS, so no problem, Win9x started Windows' growth in gaming, particularly when DirectX 5 started improving the abysmal performances of DX 2 and 3 (on my low end first PC DX 5 made playable some games previously unplayable).

Gaming helped a lot Win9x, but IBM clumsiness with OS/2 helped it even more, also because while years after MS, just threatened with fines, preferred disobeying antitrust and tribunals' rulings to carry on unfair practices that were increasing its power and wealth, back then IBM, fearing to be split, complied even more than necessary.

So the situation is by no means simple, gaming was just one of many factors, not the biggest, but not small, though.

There is a third possibilty: if they know their Client division will lose market share anyway, gaming or not, they MUST grow in other markets. So these moves could mean they already know that despite still growing in absolute numbers, Windows and Office are shrinking, or are going to, in market share.

BTW, another big business opportunity, cellphone market, was already slipping from their hands even before Google's Android made Linux+Java even stronger, as it was already second after Symbian, with iPhone and Blackberry already chewing more and more shares from Windows CE/Mobile. So pushing consoles could also be meant to make up for phones lost opportunity, knowing that Win+Office share won't grow again anymore to achieve the same compensation, a fourth possibility.

I seen the newest trailer for this game. At first I liked it but then as it went on...I started to lose interest. Hopefully it was just a bad trailer.

@Alba
I wasn't implying that gaming didn't help windows just that it's not as big as some people think.
Unless current linux enable you to do everything using the gui and not command lines the person you described would struggle with it probably to the point where it's unusable for them should they need to do more than open ie.
Thats where windows really shone and how they really won over the market. Ease of use.
DOS was a breeze to use and I still remember most of the commands as they were simple and made sense. The commands in linux aren't like that.

I expect to see this on Games for Windows 3 years from now. Just like Halo 2.