Well don't you live in Sweden with ultra fast broadband?

Anyway it'll definitely be possible as next generation games will be limited by downloadability, I.E. games will try to remain as small as possible in order to maximise potential download sales as these are more profitable than retail releases. So yes the Xbox Infinity could indeed dispense with an optical drive and distribute on SD cards as games will probably try to stay in the 10-15GB range. The only challenge is manufacturing the SD cards so they would likely be distributed by kiosk which prints and manufacturs the SD cards and cases.

Cool, but why distributed by kiosks rather than normal brick stores? I mean 3DS games are in SD cards but have a nice plastic package.

I live in Sweden but my internet is slow, 10 Mbits/s so about 4GB download per hour. I think I can upgrade it to 100Mbit for another $25 per month but I dont know how reliable it is because it still comes through the cable network.

How fast is your internet in NZ?

My internet is 12-15Mbps. Though in a couple of years we'll have 150Mbps when the broadband rollout finishes. You should really get faster internet because you'd be able to download a 10GB game in 15 minutes.

The thing with SD card kiosks is that they can be inside the store. My idea I had was that you could walk up to a kiosk and have it print out a package, case and download the data to a flash drive. Because it is so impractical to print and manufacture SD cards compared to printing out you may as well do the manufacturing in the store itself. For popular games they can always pre-print a bunch of them so they're available over the counter. In game stores you often only get a limited catalogue of the latest/popular games so being able to get the entire back catalogue would be a revelation. It'd be far more space efficient as well.

Oh yeah, the manufacturing is tricky because you can't just print them like you do with Blurays, you have to transfer the data into every card?

Yep but the advantages are fantastic if you can get over the manufacturing issues. You can get higher performance data transfer, less noise, lower cost consoles and smaller consoles and you can directly support the download option by including a substantial quantity of flash in every console; think 32GB instead of 8GB in the Wii U.

Imagine if instead of having say a 250GB mechanical HDD you could have a much more reliable 256GB flash drive? Without mechanical components the reliability of consoles can double or trebble. A fully flash based console would be an amazing device.

That's a pretty interesting chart.  In just a year Others dropped from 4.1% marketshare to 0.4%.  Did MS pick up any of that loss?  Nope.  In fact, it lost some of its marketshare to Android, as well.  So, I think MS needs to worry about reclaiming the 2.3% before it even thinks about getting to 5%, or even 10%.  Am I saying it's impossible?  Of course not.  But, it is going to be an extremely tough climb with both iOS and Android devices viewed as the "hip" things to use/have.  By the way, what ever happened to the Nokia/MS deal that was supposed really push the Windows OS marketshare?

And Kowen, really?  Android doesn't help push phone sales?  It's just another OS?  I think you may want to look at the marketshare (and units sold) in the chart above and rethink that statement.

No its not and you know it. Theres like 3 people who defend Microsoft figures. 

Actually your probably being sarcastic. LOL. I took the bait.

Microsoft's new logo, multitasking since 1995

That prediction seems so absurd that at first I thought you were either joking or insane.

But then I realized you probably just try to trick people by comparing apples and oranges and you're not talking about tablets alone, but the whole range of Windows 8 products.

Since virtually all x86-compatible devices (PCs, Notebooks, Ultrabooks, Subnotebooks, Netbooks, and soon: tablets) ship with the latest Microsoft operating systems, which now happens to be Windows 8, people will of course buy lots of "Windows 8 devices", simply because for these products there are no alternatives whatsoever.

Wherever Windows 8 has competitors (Smartphones and ARM-powered tablets), Windows 8 marketshare will stay low.

I believe that the x86-compatible tablets will sell incredible though. Not because of Windows 8, but because I believe lots of people are extremely interested in the new form factor it promotes (devices that can kind of work as both tablets and notebooks). Similar to the netbook hype.

Nobody sane could predict a true sales flop, but contributing to blur the line between PCs and non PC portable devices, MS could be inadvertently opening a backdoor that could take it to lose the near-monopoly in the traditional PC market.
But it could even be worth it if Windows will grow overalll this way, so maybe MS is doing it on purpose and betting on re-opening the old PC market, at cost of losing a monopoly, rather than risking the marginalization of the old market, keeping it closed while a huger new world grows outside of it, that would make that monopoly less and less important.