ZOMFG! Now I expect MS entering the automobile market with MS Beetle, MS Corvette, MS GTO, MS Royce... All with the legendary MS reliability!!!

Sorry, I can't remain serious, just thinking how much good luck trying to copy iPod brought them makes me guffaw to say the least.

I would buy an MS car with M-tech in it.

So if there are only negative outcome from doing this, why whould they do it?

As I said above:
Imho the Newton is not supposed to become widely accepted, let alone "save" the 360, for the very reason that it is just an add-on. It's more like a test object for a possible controlling concept on MS's next-gen platform. So I don't see it as a mistake, but on the contrary as a farsighted, reasonable decision because they can only benefit from the experiences made in the current gen. Also, third-party developers can get used to the new concept so that their next-gen projects will hopefully make reasonable use of the Newton that don't feel as if they were implemented by hook or by crook. And if MS do it right and make it work more precisely than the Wii-mote, it is more than welcome from my point of view. If e.g. Halo Wars supports it, it could make RTS way more popular on consoles than it is now.

In the short term, it might be negative, but not in the long term. If MS people were thinking only in the short term, there wouldn't have been an Xbox 360 because the original one would have had to be considered an irrecoverable failure. But there was.



I love your truisms. Here, you can make them universal: the past has demonstrated that it is not easy to get a foot in the door in some group of people for a company, unless you have a product that in some way appeals to this group of people. It was expected that Blue Dragon was enough to make the XB360 interesting for Japan market. Were you sleeping in a cave while MS trumpeted this everywhere? Now, you tell me the momentum it generated is decent? Wow! I guess that's why Blue Dragon is now headed to the DS. Anyway, I think Mistwalker destroyed their own company brand (and didn't help XBox brand in the process) and are dead already.

Blue Dragon is heading to the DS because MS are not so stupid to constrain their developers to the same extent as e.g. EA do. Remember what happened with Bungie or Bizarre? The result from their MS-approved independence is that they will happily work for MS again. I am pretty sure that Mistwalker know why MS are paying them all that money and they also know how likely it is to be really successful in Japan when releasing games exclusively for an MS platform. So now they decided to port one of their games to the DS. You think that is the result of Blue Dragon underperforming in Japan? With all that money from MS they couldn't care less. But maybe they just want to do something else than Xbox games, and MS let them because Nintendo is not their real competitor.



I won't say HDDVD, but it's good you talk about that, as it's one of their biggest failures, one of the most epic ever.

I beg to differ because they clearly didn't pump as much money into it as they could have if they really wanted it to succeed, but let's leave it at that.



With Win95, MS wanted to own the content delivery market. Don't get me wrong, that was no idea of theirs, MS never had any innovative idea. No, it came from Apple. I remember in 1993, when I started using the then brand new WWW, videos were only available in Quicktime format, Apple's vision of codecs and containers for video and audio delivery. So, MS wanted that, as everything they stole from Apple. Of course, they couldn't compete, they lose when they compete, so they tried to use their unfair advantage in Windows to get that. They started with VfW things that include AVI (which is taken from the Amiga RIFF, lots of things in Windows were taken from the Amiga actually), ans ASF for streaming, and tried to put that in everything. They started gaining ground with AVI and ASF (WMV, WMA, ...), but now it all failed, because they were disrupted in every single part of the content delivery market: codec with Xvid/H.264/..., container with Apple Quicktime (iPod) as AVI is not compatible with the new HD codecs for video, or even for music files, media with BluRay where their formats are not the main ones, ...

All this money lost, all this posturing, all this boasting about being the best, all these dirty tactics, to arrive to being insignificant: that's what I call an epic failure. This epic failure I described spanned 15 years, which is why I call it one of the more epic, with the last episode being losing the HD DVD media hope.

Perhaps you're too young to have lived through all of this. Just remember the posturing when MS said they would have the best search engine within 2 years, several years ago. People (who should know better, like the Times) actually believed them, while we knowing people just rolled on the floor laughing. That was an attack on Google. Look where they are now.

OK, at least you took the effort to elaborate on your claim, and I give you kudos for that. Well, I didn't really follow what was going on in the industry during the nineties, but you're basically talking about MS having lost in the field of search engines and in the field of multimedia content delivery. They lost against Google, OK. I admit it might be impossible for MS to win against Google. But the battle for multimedia content delivery is far from decided, so I wouldn't call their activities in that area an "epic" failure.



You mean that a brand that is know for losing 6.5 billion dollars is worth more than cash? Well OK, I'm not an expert on these things, I'll just believe you.

I am not an expert, either, but if the product is profitable at present and has promising future prospects, yes, I think then this is worth more than the amount of losses it generated before in cash (if the company still exists then, that is).



As for the hating part, you almost got it right, but failed.
I actually don't care about MS, except when they attack people like me, because you know, I'm part of the most hated group of people by MS nowadays (and since at least 1999). MS has been a good laughing stock for all these years, but they can be dangerous with all their money. I don't understand why they can't let people be instead of hating on them.

OK, so you're working either for the European Commission, for Google or for Apple :)

STOP.

That was a great example with the Blue Dragon - wonderful stuff, you should of stopped there.

When he said hated he means stuff like that 2003 article that I will not pull up because by god I'm lazy right now (just finished playing soccer) where they out right labeled a section of the gaming world as Casual, of course the continue to do that to this day, the idea is in the context of even their super chunk VP Kim Kapwan (That's not his real name) he speaks in a condecensing mannerism about casuals and is very vocal about how Hardcore is trancendental.

Of course he could of been a small business owner of some electronic software developer from back in 2001, he could also work for Comcast or who knows, not defending him though as he kind of was wrong the entire way through.

It's just Microsofts reflection, like it or not their are people who can't stand them, which is a good thing actually - it means they are still a strong company.

OT.

I think I posted this already but yea, the Wii is competing as I'm sure someone else noted - disposable income. Like it or not if I could afford a Porche I'll get it over a Ford, but if I see the Ford as being what I wanted regardless I'll get the Ford.

Get that, in that case it had nothing to do with price but with what I deemed value to be.

But the point is, I have an option.

Can Microsoft get sued for this

Short answer, no. Nintendo didn't create the technology, they are likely just licensing it. Microsoft can do the same or create their own.

360 developers will ignore motion control, since it doesn't come with the system.
360 fans will ignore motion control, because that's what 360 fans do.
Rare will store 3-6-Tiis as full models -a necessity for adding clothes- but this will cripple developer ability to use them effectively in games.
360 fans will use 3-6-Tiis for about 15 minutes, get bored, and never use them again because developers won't use them.

In other words, I'm not worried. Let Microsoft do what it wants.

lolcats speeks fa meh....

You would think that Microsoft had learnt from trying to copy the iPod that direct copying isn't a good idea, especially if you don't have the brand recognition. To many people, Apple = cool, Microsoft = fiddly and annoying. To many people, Wii = cool,
360 = nerdy.

PS3 = Geeky, 360 = Freaky and Wii = Grandmas panties.