Oh, HA HA HA! Wow. Because Windows is so unintuitive as it it. I mean, how complicated icons on a picture background can be. What a hassle, right?

Seriously.... 

He has to be joking/taking the piss. No one is that ridiculous...

It isn't. Live offers an excellent, top of the line online service for the xbox fanbase...but when you're competitor are offering free online service and OPTIONAL additional/rental/etc services at a cheaper price as well as similar features found on Live, it makes you wonders why Live is still charging. Also, the games Plus provides aren't some crappy minis or indie games. Playstation Plus is giving out (not for free) full big-time titles for less than $5 a month. You can argue that you only get to keep em as long as you are subscribed but once you beat the game, chances are you aren't going back to it,

Obviously, its the smart decision by MS. They have a loyal, die hard fanbase that willingly will put up the money for Live. Also, a heavy focus on online multiplayer shooters (CoD, Halo, GoW) ensures that people will be hook on online play.

The hate Live gets is somewhat justified, to resume, as your competitors offer very similar services to their fans for free. Granted, whether Live is A LOT better than what Sony and Nintendo offers is debatable. Personally, I've played on Live and I haven't seen a giant difference as far as connection, lag, community, etc.

Seriously? That's your justification?
So let me get this straight, you're happy to throw away a larger and superior game selection, better graphics, better controls, better framerates, cheaper prices on Games and DLC, convenience of all your games and mods in one place, automatic patching, arguably a higher bandwidth/lower latency network as it's not provided by just one company, more dedicated servers...

Not to mention the ability to give games to your friends, review games, big picture mode if you're using a Television, lots of free-to-play games, Pre-loading of pre-ordered games, available on multiple platforms, greenlight, screenshot functionality and probably a heap more, for just netflix? When you can still get Netflix just by double clicking an icon next to Steam? That's like, what 2 clicks? Not even 1 seconds worth of effort? Like, wouldn't even use a dozen calories?

Not to mention you can ADD a netflix shortcut into Steam which makes your ENTIRE argument completely redundant.

And more people use Steam than the amount of people that exist on Xbox Live! Gold, so higher player counts too.

If you want both Steam and Netflix on screen at the same time, look into a multi-monitor solution, PC gaming is easy and effortless, youtube and google which is the largest repository of information known to man-kind has all the answers you need if you ever run into issues, people should learn to use it to better themselves more often, rather than making up excuses.

This will never get anywhere. Some people think it's worth the subscription fee, others think its not. Meanwhile, Microsoft will not stop charging for it because the latest financials show that it keeps making them money and people keep signing up for it. They will continue to add services and features though, gaming related and non gaming related, to make more people think it is worth the fee. It might be more likely that other companies will follow Microsoft's path than the other way around.

You don't have to reply is there's nothing to say. Do you need to have the last word or something?

You are on a mission. A mission to find something wrong with everything I saw. I took my time writing this post to make sure it is flawless.

Still means it offers them. There still had to be an app designed specifically for XBL in order for the service to work. It's no different than Verizon offering a wide selection of premium channels. They might not actually fund and cast and film the content but they pay to get it and design it into their product so that they have more to offer the consumer. And Live has the most.

See, another blue box where I need to correct you. No one is "on a mission". You make incorrect posts, they get corrected. If you don't like it, stop making incorrect posts.

I don't think Halo 3 just had "silver weekends" I played online, on weekdays, with a silver account. Halo 3 was playable day 1 online with a silver account, and that feature got removed, hence silver is reduced to push you to go gold.

360 gold deals are only available if you use your credit card. I don't trust anyone with a subscription service via credit card, I've had bad experiences with Rogers and stuff.

As for Games for Windows games being free, limited time thing or not, they still used to offer free online to silver members on XBL, and those games are still free to play on PC. How come someone with a PC version of Lost Planet gets to play for free, when a 360 user pays for it? They both use the same matchmaking service.

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Who cares is PS3 exclusives have trophy's related to playing games for prolonged periods of time online. Online is free, so I have no problem with that. You mentioned that developers control achievements, but Halo and Gears of War are Microsoft IP's, MS has a lot of say in their achievements, and just comparing the new achievements in Halo 4/Gears 3, I feel weekly allowances of maps in spartan ops was a decision made by MS. Microsoft is designing games which require Gold subscriptions, stuff you can't unlock from a trail, and that's annoying. It makes the game more expensive to play and complete.

Another good example is that you can't get all the achievements in Halo Reach unless you buy a new copy of Halo: CEA. A used copy doesn't let you install the Reach map packs. , so you can't play a Reach specific game type and get the achievement from the Halo CEA game disk. Halo CEA is still a $40 game too....

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My issues with MS are how they market, or in my opinion butcher, their games and services. Silver features have been removed, XBLG "Deal of the Weeks" are usually crap, and not permanent, Microsoft published games tend to have as much DLC in price as the game itself, achievements from 1st party games specifically are designed to promote XBL services (e.g. Kinect, or XBLG Achievements) there is no pay as you go plan for XBL, or 1 month XBLG card (In Canada there isn't), and 3 month cards cost about 50% as much as a 12 month card, so it's really not worth it, etc.

Microsoft isn't what it used to be. Gears of War 1 had free map packs after a year, but Gears 2/3 have 4 map packs, and their price never goes down permanently. Yes a lot of 3rd party's do this too, but they never used to sell old DLC cheap, and DLC for identical games on steam are supper cheap. Why is that? MS charges devs to sell DLC on XBL, so they can never bring the price down too much without loosing money. Steam encourages permanent price cuts on DLC, but XBL does not.

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Plus you're ignoring the fact that paying for XBL means you're paying Microsoft for what 3rd party's bring. If CoD has dedicated servers, your XBL subscription fee isn't paying for that, it was your purchase of the game which paid for it. XBL hate is justified because you're paying for nothing, and there are no pay as you go, or alternative plans to the expensive $60 a year subscription.

Are you done now?