The Xbox One vs PS4 console war has been pretty balanced with none of the two competitors throwing around any major punches. The sales are somehow close and the consumers are still largely undecided. Well, that was until the recent announcement of PlayStation Now. The Gakai-powered service was announced at CES 2014, and it seems like Sony has thrown the first punch. PlayStation Now allows the users to stream PS3 titles to their PS4’s and in the long run it will allow streaming to PS3, PS Vita, PS4 and some select Bravia television sets. It was a very impressive presentation by Sony and most people are already predicting that Sony has already won, as far as the console wars are concerned.

So far Microsoft has given a lot about their plans but very little on when they are planning to take off. The announcement of the Xbox One signaled how Microsoft was more eager to pursue cloud gaming power, they even went as far as making their latest gaming console disc drive-less. Microsoft are not the fastest in upgrading their services, but they place a lot of emphasis on quality and their Xbox live service proved to be a bigger hit than Sony’s PSN. The lack of backward compatibility has always been one of main cons of the Xbox one and the PS4. Sony managed to solve this issue through the PlayStation Now, but Microsoft is bound to introduce the same feature. In fact Microsoft members were seen playing Xbox 360’s Halo 3 on a Lumia and Xbox One during a company meeting.

According to Xbox’s incubation manager Jeff Henshaw, the Xbox One Cloud will give the gaming console storage and CPU equivalent of three other consoles. Critics have attacked this statement with claims that the consoles will be held back by latency and bandwidth issues because the average internet speed in the most develop countries only hits 8 Mbps. EA’s technology officer went further by claiming that the latest consoles “have adopted electronics and an integrated systems-on-a -chip (soc) architecture that unleashes magnitudes more compute and graphics power than the current generation of console”.  This shows that sooner or later the Xbox One and the PS4 will be able to overcome the minor issues that are holding back cloud gaming.

It has been common industry knowledge that Microsoft has been investing billions to improve their cloud infrastructure since 2009. They have set up data centers left and right and they are close to overthrowing Amazon as the number 1-cloud service providers. Furthermore ever since 2011 the company has invested more than $8.6 billion to develop and research into cloud services. And according to Bill Gates, there’s no stopping there, the company set up 25 data centers in 2013 and they have announced coverage for China, Australia and Japan. The beauty of this is that Xbox One’s will give developers the chance to access this growing Azure cloud platform.

In reality it is only Google and Microsoft that have a ‘cloud’. They are the only two companies that have enough data centers spread out across the globe to constitute a technical cloud. Microsoft also confirmed that all Xbox One games would have access to this $10 billion dollar investment while Sony is still dependent on a few dedicated servers mostly spread around the US. PlayStation Now can handle the demand that it is receiving at the moment because it is only available for US customers. In the long run the main difference will be that Sony’s cloud services allow you to play games that you don’t have on your console while the Xbox Cloud will enable you to play games at a better performance level than on any cloud.

Whatever Xbox is working on, it must be something big. The investment in upgrading their cloud services and the Xbox One in itself has certainly made Microsoft the most likely candidate to win the gaming console battle in the future, in the cloud that is. If Microsoft goes further ahead in their plans to run Xbox One Live on the Azure Cloud Platform, then cloud gaming’s future is bright indeed. Microsoft might be taking a beating at the moment, but I am certain that they will come back swinging in the months to come.

http://www.raptgamersunited.com/blog/the-xbox-one-cloud.html

You're right, online article.
It is big, unfortunately almost nothing to do with gaming though.

Wow. This man has absolutely no understanding of how the internet or computer hardware works.

I bought the xperia z1 and it came from 2 months free access to music unlimited. I'm assuming this service is similar to both services Ms and Sony for their cloud gaming, I may be wrong and you guys can correct me.
Music unlimited at first seemed awesome, especially that you could select to have the music play while offline but the service fails hard. Download songs or albums and they don't play the app crashes instead, then you go to delete the failed songs but they don't delete. This is when the app will load...
I'm in Australia and maybe that has something to do with it but saying this I am connected to 4g.
With such a poor music system I can't see streaming games will work when songs 4mbs in size don't. Then again it may just be an aussie problem.

Ps I wrote that using my phone and just noticed it came out retarded...sorry.

Microsoft has been lying about the power of the xbox one since day one. Just look at how their statements have changed throughout the last few months. They said you were getting 3 xbox ones when you bought one because of the power of the cloud. Now they are saying the ps4's power gap is "fairly marginal." So they've change their statements so much that they are now claiming the xbox one is about half the strength they originally claimed. That's ridiculous.
I Also don't understand how this “have adopted electronics and an integrated systems-on-a -chip (soc) architecture that unleashes magnitudes more compute and graphics power than the current generation of console” means any of the crap you're claiming it does.

Well, the author missed the part about Amazon Web Services being the biggest. Microsoft has already shown you can move some processing to the cloud, and more than that is what Sony is trying to do.

I think I'm more confused than before I read it. And double check, my Xbox One still has a disk drive in it.

Ive been using Xbox Music now for 3 years. £89.90 for 1 year. Ive never experienced what you say. It works perfectly on Xbox One, 360, Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.

Best thing is across all of Microsofts devices just the 1 yearly cost covers ALL devices. Offline downloads on phones etc all included in the price. Best music services across devices Ive ever used.