Stephen Elop to run Xbox
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/211570/Former_Nokia_boss_Stephen_Elop_now_in_charge_of_Xbox.php
Wow… I literally have nothing to add to this one. Clearly Microsoft intends to sell off or divest its ownership in XBOX.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5080192/microsoft-ceo-candidate-stephen-elop-bing-xbox-rumors
okay… maybe one little comment. So they put Elop in charge of ditching the XBONE albatross Microsoft made, hopefully before anybody notices that it might be a failure?
http://www.polygon.com/2014/2/24/5443358/sonys-sales-lead-is-great-news-for-new-xbox-one-customers-and-ea
I wonder who Sataya will put in charge of ditching Metro?
Do you really think they can ditch XBOne w/o conceding the whole market to Sony?
Well, they might have killed it when they screwed up the launch and the product, Elop just got the mop up job.
Could they afford to screw up Vista and Windows mobile and cede the consumer computing market to Apple?
Well, you can say that was blindness on their part. They didn’t even see Apple coming. They didn’t even see the whole mobile market coming. Right now in consoles, it’s very clearly Sony vs MS, and in the PS4 vs XB. Sony has a slight edge in sales but it’s nothing that can be beat. Unless MS does something that would make dev’s think writing games for the XB is a waste because MS is washing it’s hands of it, so they’ll flock to Sony and game over. Because Nintendo doesn’t even count right now.
That’s not true… they saw mobile as critical, invested in it loooong before Apple, and long regarded Apple as their primary competitor in the consumer space. They just screwed up, failed to execute against a future they ABSOLUTELY anticipated. They saw the future clearly and got run over by it ANYWAY. Your understanding of XBOX’s success or failure comes from consumer press, NOT from Microsoft’s books or from financial analysts who pour over Microsoft’s financial statements. The realities painted by the numbers vs the consumer PR propaganda that gamers read is very different. XBOX has never been a financial success for Microsoft, it’s a long term cost center. It’s not clear whether or not Microsoft has ever recovered the investment they put into entering the console business in the first place. Launching a console is like launching a major motion picture. They can predict the financial outcome for a major motion picture with 95% accuracy based on its opening weekend box office sales… the same is more or less true for a console, if they’re trailing Sony now, it will trail Sony forever and the gap will widen. Microsoft already knows their MAXIMUM potential upside for the XBOX ONE and that number must not be exciting to them.
Yea I agree with that. From a financial perspective I believe Xbox is still in the red over lifetime aggregate. It’s good for consumer sentiment though, which they kinda need. As far as domains that MS sees critical… They see a lot of stuff as critical, but w/o being able to properly follow through. Mobile is an example as you said. They were pioneers, but tunnel visioned it only as to they can be tiny desktop PCs. Tablets is another one. Tiny desktop PC with a pen. Just having a feeling that an area might be important and pouring some money into it doesn’t always qualify as an *investment*.
I suspect that, Microsoft’s problems in the consumer space are also the reason for their success in the Enterprise. Making consumer products is a touchy-feely business and Microsoft’s culture values strident technical rationalism. I think they consistently fail in the consumer space because they can’t culturally balance their engineer driven rationalism with the kind of mass market “emotional” insight and creativity that Apple seems to execute so well against. As unfortunate as it is, it isn’t irrational for them to give it up if they recognize that they may never be great at it.
That’s a fair argument. The potential downside is that the high-school/college kids of today are the business and IT decision makers of tomorrow. And when the time comes to start deciding which company to go with for business needs, they’d have a strong bias to go with the companies that grew up with. Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.
Yup, in theory it seems like a huge mistake to fail utterly in the consumer computing market… but how long should they lose money trying before focusing on a business they are successful at? I don’t have an informed opinion on that one, just observing that it’s what they seem to be concluding here.
Killing Bing, not necessarily a bad idea. Killing XBox… good bye to the one consumer electronics product MS has made that’s had a measure of actual success…
Sony don’t make a profit out of PS either, do they? Or if they do, its minute.
Whether they should continue with the xbox – well – its got a marketing benefit, so if it makes a small loss, its probably still worth it, to get MS name out there in something sexier than a word processor. To use that horrid word synergy – maybe they need phones, Xbox and tablets to keep their name in the public eye. Also if they step out of the console market then the remaining players would all do better, because of reduced competition, and that wouldn’t suit MS, because it would expose Windows itself more, because it would become less important as a gaming platform (because of loss of (some) crossover between xbox and pc game development and gamers spending less time in an MS world).
I suspect that you are correct, I believe the PS/3 was a huge sink hole for them. I recall their CTO telling me that they had invested something like 8b on the cell processor, which as we know now turned out to be an irrelevant chip architecture.
I could hang out with astrophysicists all day.
Something is going down and it dont look like they are being game centric these days.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-02-13-microsofts-pc-gaming-chief-leaves-after-just-six-months
Pc Dude left for ego reasons/better pay or frustration how j allard less microsoft is doing games. ( all xbox noo pc) they got the dude that says he will dump the xbox brand to another seller…. maybe they are pulling out games slowly like sega did? ( i would sega to buy xbox but it wont happen
and ya xbone is pretty bad. it may be for the best since the people that knew how to make good game console and got games seem to be gone .
The new controler is worse than my xbox 360 transform d-pad and not as cool as the 1st xbox or xbox 360 in lots of ways I think it is worse. the ps4 is the better machine for less money.
Very sad I used to love the 1st xbox and xbox 360 it was my main game platform even though I had sony and nintendo consoles at the same time. the xbox was the big powerful pc like machine that I would get most of the console games on because they was better on the xbox now that is not the case I will be getting them on ps4 now. I dont even want the xbone lots of things about it turn me off. might get a steambox or something.
Oh and they killed rareware and most of it’s IP the new killer instinct for it is filled with bugs crashes lock ups and it is just a street fighter 4 rip off now it is nothing like the old KI games dont have that style. I can buy street fighter 4 clones lots of places.
kameo and perfect dark on xbox 460 was good though but MS dont let them do that stuff anymore. it may not have gave them high sales but it made the game slection for it more diverse and thus attracted more people. letting rare do what they want. if nintendo fans decided to buy another machine they would pick the xbox for rare games but MS killed that and they dont get what made rare special at all.
http://www.examiner.com/article/microsoft-thought-they-owned-donkey-kong
http://www.latinpost.com/articles/8054/20140227/ps4-vs-xbox-one-study-confirms-gamers-prefer-playstation-4.htm
Hummm
http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/4/5470388/xbox-live-android-ios#218655635
Maybe they are turning xbox into a software and cloud platform and then they are going to slowly dump the console hardware?
Xbone games run in a virtual machine if i remember right…if they make the VM run on other hardware…….Java ish
Or just dump it all and pull a sega and make games and xbox brand is some then type of cloud service…something
Aw, man – Alex, Jez and Radu in the same forum? It’s like an embryonic Wildtangent in a little corner of the web and brings a tear to my eye.
I can still sort of smell your basement, Alex 🙂
Just so I have something to contribute while I’m getting all misty-eyed, an individual who shall remain nameless called me a few weeks ago and invited me to do a presentation at MS, with some other developers, in front of a ‘couple hundred executives’ (!) about why we WEREN’T using Windows 8 or pursuing development for the XBone. I’m pretty sure I was tapped for this because of the way I, er, held forth over a lunch meeting about the failures of Windows 8 while it was in beta, some time ago.
I, uh, declined to present. No upside to that!
There’s some sort of institutional blindness over there to the practical concerns of a business which is NOT Microsoft. If the invite and presentation is any indication, at least a percentage of the MS population realizes this – but maybe don’t really know what to do about it.
Ah Travis, fond memories but YOU can never go back now that you have aspired successfully to become management overhead yourself. Congratulations. 🙂 I was actually bragging about your achievements from humble beginnings in front of an audience of aspiring game developers today.
Travis is the founder of Runic Games, creators of Torchlight for those of you who aren’t aware of this blogs prestigious readership.
Obviously now that you are a man with great responsibilities it’s not your job to poke the giant or help them find a clue. That said however, I will point out that telling morons exactly what you think of them is its own reward and sometimes doing morons the favor of educating them is at most harmless and occasionally beneficial.
The people who invite you to speak need you to say what they can’t for fear of losing their jobs. Sometimes when you help them out, they end up in positions of power later and remember that you assisted them when you had no good reason to bother. I consider the energy I spend doing favors for people who can’t do anything to benefit me, paying forward the faith my first employers and managers invested in me before I became successful and influential in my own right. 1 in 100 of those favors makes all the wasted ones worthwhile, the trick is to get your volume high.
I once bet that I could take web designers with no computer science background and make them great game developers… the tiny number that actually succeeded made all the other attempts worthwhile. You are a graduated leader now, last advice from me, not that you need it, is to be generous with your time and favors. There are a lot of people in the game industry who would benefit tremendously from hearing your story and a few will be grateful and remember that you helped them when you didn’t need to… or most valuable of all, told them things they resented hearing but came to realize that they needed to hear to succeed… much later. Microsoft needs to hear a few harsh things and will most likely ignore and resent the messengers, but sometimes… they will hire (or buy) them and put them in charge.
If you change your mind and accept the invitation, do them the huge favor of telling them EXACTLY what you think of them. I suspect that your advancing age and experience has done nothing but sharpen your passion for making a great product. More people, especially at Microsoft need to see what “the real deal” looks like. The company of too many witless drones can sap the institutional memory of what greatness should look and sound like.
Handing the job to Elop suggests it may be too late for the XBOX in any event, but we’re only speculating on that point at the moment aren’t we?
Speaking of institutional blindness here’s on of my favorite recent Microsoft witless drone articles:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2098585/windows-ui-designer-explains-why-forcing-metro-on-all-is-great-for-power-users.html
Here’s an example of a drone who is so clueless about what a completely disastrously bad idea, rational and execution Metro was that he feels comfortable trying to soft-peddle his drone-think publicly! This is a mentality so completely delusional and detached from reality that NOTHING you could say, no matter how harsh, is likely to accomplish any more than fall on deaf ears. If you have an entire organization that is immersed in an isolated culture of self-reinforcing drone-think, how does it change unless somebody eventually fires them all and hires somebody who sounds NOTHING LIKE ANY OF THEM to try a new approach? Microsoft needs to hear voices that don’t sound ANYTHING like these idiots.
There’s little doubt in my mind that the Elop “promotion” is a step in the direction of firing them… one way or another… the whole phenomena reminds me of AOL at its “peak” when we were dealing with them and it was clear that institutional collapse was taking place even as they were still regarded as Internet leaders. They had culturally crumbled on the inside long before the world realized that it was a fatal condition. I recall AOL’s CTO at the time saying to me that randomly firing half of their staff would improve productivity. He was right… before they fired him for saying it… and then 100% of those people all lost their jobs as well including the CEO.
Clueless indeed, though there was one point he made that makes some sense, IF they had executed:
“A month ago, Miller made similar comments, going so far as to say that “our main goal [in Windows 8] wasn’t to support touch screens, it’s to separate casual users from pro users.”
The problem is the separation became Windows 8 for new casual users and Windows 7 for everyone else…
If they had provided a full solution for pro users, and let people decide whether they wanted the casual or pro experience, they would have been hailed as visionary, revolutionary, listening to what users want etc etc. So near yet so far. They could still today fix things, by giving the pro users what they want.
Also, its not really just about casual vs pro – its about new vs experienced – many people who have got their heads around W7, even if they are casual users, would rather stick with something more familiar. You have to ease those folks into a new paradigm, not throw them off the cliff.
Yeah.. this reminds me of a great quote for LOTR:
Gandalf on giving Boromir the one ring: … “What you say would sound like wisdom, but for the warning in my heart…”
It’s madness cloaked in reasonable sounding words. Something Microsoft people can be disturbingly good at. It sounds like great rationale so you miss the key warning here, the casual and gross mis-identification of the real problem. It starts with “The problem is the separation became Windows 8 for new casual users and Windows 7 for everyone else”
What? Really? How exactly is the Metro UI even remotely a sane approach to making Windows accessible to a “casual user” even assuming that it’s execution was a “Flawless” implimentation of Microsofts vision for it? Are you kidding me? How does hiding primary UI elements in the corners of the screen help UI discovery? How does completely dominating the screen with each app help “Casual users” figure out how to navigate anywhere? How does a horrendous random color and icongraphy scheme help “casual users” consistently identify important UI elements? How does REPLACING a familiar UI paradign EVEN TO CASUAL USERS reduce their learning curve? How does littering the desktop with every application available without regard to what people commonly use or are actually looking for aid their ability to find apps they want? How do you NOT KNOW that it’s not even remotely going to work hours, days, weeks, months before you ship a major OS release and NOT make the decision to immediately change course to avert inevitable disaster? It’s like having an airplane cockpit occupied by two pilots who agree that flying into a mountaintop, although not an ideal outcome, is preferable to spilling the passengers drinks by attempting to avoid it… after all, maybe they’ll be able to build the plane right out of the wreckage WHEN they survive the crash…
See how that worked? From Microsoft’s point of view it was a BRILLIANT idea that was just slightly flawed by poor execution, NOT the catastropically stupid idea that was mortally foolish from the moment of its idiotic conception to the hopelessly unsalvagable mess it evolved into. Accepting THAT perspective requires firing all of them, not continuing to pay them to KEEP being that delusional and stupid on Microsoft’s dime, and this guy isn’t going to endorse that cure, now is he?
Actually on further consideration, I don’t even believe a word this guy is saying. He is playing the “We were just a little bit stupid and mismanaged” card over the “We tried for forcibly usurp control of everybody’s home page and it completely backfired” truth of what happened here. I am far more readily convinced that Microsoft is likely to commit “errors of aggression” over being just plane old fashioned village idiots once in a while. Nobody there can publicly admit that they tried to erase Google and Yahoo home pages in one fell move and keep their jobs.
Nobody at Microsoft is foolish enough to do such an egregiously sloppy job on UI design for “casual users” unless it’s a distant second priority…
Windows 7 is good for us because we are so familiar with it. There are many people who are more used to a Mac, or nothing, and will start with a phone or tablet. The Windows 7 UI is not really usable on tablets and phones, and its not intuitive either, its just very familiar to us after decades of using it.
Windows 8 is a bad UI in many ways, but I don’t think its as bad for new casual users, or people using touch devices, as people make out. And MS had no choice – they had to do something for phones and tablets – and for people being introduced to windows via those devices, it would be more intuitive to use Metro on a PC, at least at first.
The idea of hiding functions behind magic swipes – well – everyone seems to be at it, from OS makers to game developers. I find it hateful, trying to work out the magic method to get something to happen. I just spent 5 minutes trying to get my wife’s iPhone calendar from a week planner view to an agenda. Turns out you have to turn the damn phone round and it magically changes view as it rotates – but she handed it me landscape, so I just kept it that way while trying to figure it out.
And why doesn’t an iPhone have a Back button? Its annoying, but it works for Apple users, though if they removed it from Android it would generate the same feelings that W8 does.
I have seen my 86 year old mum handle an iPad, but not a PC. My very techie daughter-in-law loves her Windows phone and W8 touch laptop. My mother-in-law gets lost on her Windows 7 laptop because it is too open. Many people need to start in a much more constrained interface, where they can’t get as lost.
In a way, W8 to W7 is like Windows to DOS. People didn’t like Windows because it constrained you in many ways – but it won out – and it only took 20 years from the first crap version to one we don’t want to lose – so Windows 16 should be awesome…
See, this is what I mean Jez… do you really believe that your 86 year old granny was ever going to start computing today if she didn’t start 20 years ago? Or that Metro with it’s unreadable white text on technicolor background does anything to make computing more accessible to a nearly blind grandmother? Or that there is a single child alive today who has not been exposed to a PC or Mac desktop from their earliest moments alive through school who is befuddled by computing and needs a NEW training wheel UI to get started? Or that old people or children are the early adopters of $600 smart phones and tablets and need to be introduced to touch UI in order to be sold on these devices? Or that they were FIRST introduced to computing by these devices and now have to be re-educated to use a PC again? It’s all ABSURD Jez, it makes no sense at all.
At least when Windows was pissing off DOS users there was a 95% potential market of total non-computer users to pursue. EVERYBODY knows how to use a desktop today, EVERYBODY, kids, granny, morons, poor people, EVERYBODY, it makes no damn sense! There is no NEW generation of computer illiterate children who have NEVER seen a desktop, used one for school or have any fear at all about figuring one out given the thousands of random video game UI’s they have become accustomed to learning at the earliest ages possible. It was just madness Jez, plain and simple, none of that BS makes any sense at all in the real world.
It all boils down to a very simple point… why FORCE Metro on the market and hide the desktop? Even if every delusional utterance about “casual users” were absolutely true… why FORCE it? What explains FORCING it? Who did that help? Was your 86 year old grandma going out to Best Buy on her own to purchase her first PC and set it up? (Have you tried the Windows 8 setup experience?) Were your computer illiterate children going to go out and buy a $600 PC by themselves and try to set it up on their own? Unless you have a brilliantly rational answer to why they FORCED it on the desktop, it’s all a HUGE lie to hide a completely different motive… Microsoft saw a benefit to themselves of doing this that was SO GREAT, it was worth the incredible risk of alienating their entire existing user base to try.
I believe it because it just happened. She had not used a computer before, but as of this Christmas she has an iPad mini and is using it daily for a variety of things (chat, photos, browsing, games, google). If she had started on a surface then W8 would have been a fairly easy transition for her. We tried her on a Windows laptop about 4 years ago and it never got used.
But don’t get me wrong – Metro is not good in many ways – but I also recognise that I am now programmed to understand Windows 7 and earlier.
And as we both agree, they didn’t execute right, and didn’t give a choice for existing users (which is the big majority).
Still, I am struggling to see what motive MS have – what is this huge benefit they are chasing?
On new users – if you took a new user and just presented them with W7 or W8 then it seems obvious to me that they would get started a lot more easily with W8, because the things they will use are there. If they had used a tablet or phone beforehand then they would find W8 a lot more natural than W7. It may end up leaving them frustrated, like buying a bicycle with stabilisers you can never take off, but at least they would get going more easily.
Also, until people are born able to use a computer then clearly every child has to start somewhere. These days they are going to start on a phone or tablet much more often than a PC. That means W8 will be a more natural progression for them.
I should also add that my nieces first experience of a pc was with W8 and they have no problem with it. They happily switch between ipods and W8 laptops.
And in an MS world where Windows phone and Surface are successful it makes even more sense to provide a progression from them to a PC.
I really don’t think they thought they were forcing it. Its more that they just didn’t see how people would react. I think they assumed power users would hit the start button and type the name of what they wanted, the same as in W7. Once you know how to work W8 its not that different for a power user, but they failed to provide the crib sheet for W7 power users and just left them to sink and bitch.
It was a communication problem more than anything else. They just need to provide the onward progression for experienced users to avoid all the nannying in Metro.
Also, while everyone is focusing on the negatives of W8, there are things that Metro interface can do, that would be useful for a whole variety of people. It like a set of mini windows in a popout and one day we will get used to using it for monitoring a whole range of things ‘at a glance’ – whether its new emails, new messages, stock prices, webcam, or whatever. Its like the old W7 status bar on steroids, if they put it all together right one day.
No dude, you totally missed the point. Microsoft KNEW they were f**king it up out of the gate, they didn’t care because the goal was to usurp the homepage from Google and Yahoo and impose Bing as the default search paradigm at ANY cost. They’ve tried it several times in the past and encountered legal hurdles that blocked them from forcibly making BING the only search option in IE. This was their cutest move yet, it had NOTHING to do with making life easier for your grandmother or nieces. That’s bogus public rationale for your consumption. They were flat out trying to jack Yahoo and Google’s home page dominance and it backfired BADLY.
Microsoft doesn’t give a damn about winning your 86 year old grandmother as a customer and NOBODY except maybe Warren Buffet introduces their young children to computing with a $600 dollar FRAGILE mobile device. It’s NOT a child’s first computing experience unless mom hands them her phone to play games while she’s driving to shut them up. Who let’s their young kids have free access to an open internet connection anyway… especially one with a camera? You’re pulling my leg on this statement to aren’t you? “If she had started on a surface then W8 would have been a fairly easy transition for her. We tried her on a Windows laptop about 4 years ago and it never got used.” You can’t possibly believe that BS… fess up Jez, you’re just arguing for fun… Why didn’t you buy her a surface for Xmas instead of an iPad if you didn’t want her Windows laptop gathering dust… hmmmm?
It was classic, Microsoft, competitive strategy that blew up in their faces. They were trying to jack Google and Yahoo in one move and failed. They knew from the outset that they were inviting a backlash, they got negative feedback on the strategy loud and clear at its earliest inception… they had a strategic reason to ignore it all. The “whoops, we f**ked it up accidentally” nonsense is for plausible deniability. The choice to FORCE it on an unwilling audience is the move that gives their real motives away. Killing Google and Yahoo equals capturing Google+Yahoo’s entire ad business and market cap. It was a desperate move that failed.
iPad because a Surface is silly money and not as easy to use. Why would she want a PC anyway now. Her iPad does everything she wants.
That points to one reason MS felt the need to go Metro. People are finding that tablets do all that they want, and that is a huge danger for them. So they had to find a way to move people from tablets to something more powerful that they control more, so having a familiar looking PC became important for them.
Kids start with phones and tables more than they do with laptops and desktops these days – its not a case of being Warren Buffet, its the opposite. These devices start at $150, not $600, and are cheaper and more robust than laptops and PCs. Its an ongoing shift away from PCs and laptops, towards phones and tablets. It was predictable 4 years ago and would undoubtedly have factored into planning W8. The younger they are the more they start with tablets and phones. Its a huge danger for MS.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/kids-love-tablets/
MS problem is not just the browser – its about people not using PCs at all, especially when younger. Because then they can end up using Android laptops or Linux desktops or whatever. Cementing kids into an MS path at a young age is vital for MS long term.
Its about office tools, app stores, windows licenses, mapping, Skype, photos, social media etc – they have far more to lose than just advertising through Bing. If they don’t get people into the MS ecosystem they are screwed.
So your argument is that Microsoft BRILLIANTLY analyzed market trends, deliberately designed a UI that they IMAGINED met the needs of children and old ladies, received the feedback that EVERYBODY including kids and old ladies hated it, ignored the feedback for some reason and decided to FORCE it on EVERYBODY including their entire current customer base of “power users” anyway for no apparent reason? Makes total sense… you persuaded me… what was I thinking?
Yes, I think they analysed it and realised tablets and phones were becoming the lead-in to PC usage, and the consequences of that were bad for them, so they needed to try to provide some continuity for those people, who 10 years later would be their new Office users.
Also I think they believed they were not forcing their current customer base to use Metro – they naively believed people would understand that Metro was a glorified start menu, and that the desktop mode would satisfy people. This would even have been true if they had bothered to explain it better. It still is true – you don’t have to use Metro – and while you may enjoy pointing out its numerous flaws, you can just avoid it by closing your eyes and typing, pretty much.
Also its just not true that EVERYBODY hates it. There are plenty of people, especially those with no comparison point, who are fine with it. They will learn that it restricts them, maybe, eventually, but they won’t care, because they use phones and tablets that are already exactly like that (one app at once etc).
After all, nobody is complaining that tablets don’t have windows side by side. Or that they can’t adjust the choke manually on their car, or that they can’t just write to memory when programming. There is a reason higher level more restrictive language account for almost all programming, and for why automatic cars are so popular even though they give less control. People are not bothered about the ultimate control and speed of use, except for techies.
yeah… that makes no sense as a theory Jez. They knew they had a major customer rejection of it long before they launched it and did it anyway… Sinofsky didn’t blow up the Microsoft Windows business and lose his shot at Ballmer’s job because he was naïve about the market reaction to Metro, he thought he was making a play for Bing dominance that was worth the price. Come on, you know I know these people and ran “competitive strategy” for them at one time, you know the DRG team that reported to BALLMER. They’re the same people, they didn’t leave Microsoft, they got promoted, they’re still in charge operating the same way as the days when they tried to kill Netscape by building IE into the OS and kill Yahoo and Google search by making Bing the default search option in IE. They didn’t stop trying it just because they lost a few anti-trust battles. I know you can’t stand to lose an argument but you’re just waving your hands now. The MARKET hates Metro, it’s so bad that the PC OEM’s are reverting to pre-installing Windows 7. The only thing that sold WORSE for Microsoft than Windows 8 were SURFACE devices and windows phones until they started to give them away, time will tell if they also sank the XBONE with it. Microsoft wasn’t trying to sell a NEW PC to anybody’s grandmother or child. They didn’t blow up their market today for a possible customer in a decade. That’s crazy talk Jez, you don’t believe a word you are saying now.
This is priceless, Sinofsky on why this is all a brilliant idea:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/31/designing-for-metro-style-and-the-desktop.aspx
“We chose to take the approach of building a design without compromise.”
Really? Is that what they delivered?
Isn’t it a little convenient that Metro is so difficult to navigate with that you constantly have to revert to using the Bing search toolbar to find anything on your desktop now? What Sinofsky actually means is no-compromise for Microsoft not for You the user, I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that the user experience was COMPLETELY compromised.
Read the comment thread, even before anybody has seen the Windows 8 UI they are clearly and loudly telling Microsoft what the problem is with this “approach”… they haven’t even SEEN IT YET and they are warning Microsoft. It all TOTALLY fell on deaf ears…
“Fulgan Thursday, September 1, 2011 3:24 AM #
When I read this, along all I read and saw about Windows 8 and metro, I have two old saying that come to my mind:
“In your haste to make new friends, do not trample on your old ones”
“When provided with a choice between the original and a copy, people will always prefer the original”
I’m all for Microsoft to develop a rich tablet-centric UI for Windows but tablets aren’t going to replace PCs any time soon for a variety of things. Tablets are gadgets. Nice gadgets indeed, but certainly not up to the task for serious work. Basing the whole Windows experience on that and treating the traditional UI as a second-class citizen is a serious mistake. If Windows 8 goes this way, I predict it will have the same fate as Vista: it will be ignored until something better comes around.”
Fulgan here was a freaking Nostradamus… he NAILED it. Metro was a totally obvious, completely avertable FAIL for Microsoft. There are NO good excuses for this one.
Hey Travis – nice to hear from you. You should take up their invite – for the sake of the rest of us… Or at least send them a memo.
If it costs $2billion to keep on with xbox, and it still lets them accumulate IP in that space, and keeps Microsoft in the public eye and living room, I still think its worth it. It sounds like a lot, but it is not really, in the context of a Microsoft. The thing is, if they pull out of that market, it both makes their competitors more profitable, and gives their competitors the mindshare in a place MS do not want it. The knockon effects are immense if MS give up on this. It would be like getting a good start in the phone business and then pulling out – MS decided that business was so important they have had to buy back in – they don’t want to be doing the same in the home entertainment field in 3 years time – these things are no longer disjoint – they all feed into each other, either via mindshare, or by actual connection (iphones to apple tvs for example).
What they have done with xbone though is lose the focus on the priority (gaming). They did exactly the same with Windows 8 – took their eye off the most important audience (IT / developer types – those that make or break products).
Its not just MS that have really lost the plot though – Google are rapidly becoming as bad – the recent changes to Chrome show they really have no effing idea what they are doing – it feels as if the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
It feels like there is a pool of people being passed around from company to company, because nobody knows how to get rid of them, and these muppets are wrecking product after product. These include the likes of Elop – they can talk the talk, but are actually clueless. It is why Jobs was so powerful – the muppets got rid of him by talking a talk, but they were totally useless, so eventually they brought Jobs back, because he could walk the walk. MS need people (at the top) who talk less, listen more, and are genuinely smart enough to pick a good course for their products. They do have these people in some products (MS Office, SQL server), but not in other areas (Windows, Xbox) any more.
Here it is the new PR salted statement from the xbox team members. Hot off the press by hours
http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/9/5488926/microsoft-remains-extremely-committed-to-xbox-says-phil-spencer
They used the exact same words about games for windows live and other things they killed off too…
…well… what else would you say if you wanted to sell it off? “We’re NOT committed to XBOX, please stop buying them and the team can pack it in and jump-ship for other jobs! So who wants to pay a premium for it?”
Wow. This is a fascinating blog read, and I normally don’t read blog posts. But, I was wondering what ever became of Kate Seekings (by using Google), and ran across this page… I came to MS in 98, Eric Engstrom hired me. I can’t remember if I was tangentially working for The Saint, or if he was in the process of moving on, or had already moved on – I was then, and still am, a little teeny grunt at MS. Oh sure I’m a Principle SDE, but compared to the people that actually make real decisions at MS, I’m a gnat in a hurricane – unnoticed. What’s interesting about this post is not the opinions about whether or not XBOX/Metro/Whatever will live or die, but how there obviously a huge barrier between “the people that make the actual decisions, and the bizarre strategies behind them” (like Metro being a cover to steal Google/Yahoo’s ad-space) and the little gruntlings doing all the actual work, based on terrible specs and marketing analysis that they perform. I’ve been at MS for 16 years now, and I’ve never understood the connection between upper management and how they manage to spin-doctor our stuff, and the little guys, who have just enough time (or less) to handle the crap they’ve written vs some new piece of crap that they want to work on, or want to sell so they can be promoted up the chain. I’ve never even heard of an upper manager saying “oh – hey – you, little group, we’ve done some research and it seems like we need component/technology X, and we don’t have it yet, can you do this in 1 year so we can sell it?” It always seems to be something more like this: Little guy says to himself, “oh jeez, it would be really neat for my career if our group came up with W, so let’s present a case for building it, and I will be promoted”. And then they do it, then the higher-ups try to sell it, then some people get promoted, lose interest, then go work on something else, then the technology becomes unsupportable and is eventually dropped. I just have never witnessed the Grand Wizardry Alex eludes to, and perhaps it’s because it’s so well executed, or because I am so damned low on the totem pole. Which makes me feel just great. Not. Who wants to hire a kick ass programmer? 🙂
Kate disapeared some years ago, rumor is that she got hitched and lives happily ever after in Vancouver but I haven’t heard from her in years.
I can’t speak authoritatively for msft today but there is some evidence that Metro arrived from above. I agree that it was/is a great strength of MSFT when ideas bubbled up from the bottom… and I suppose it’s possible that Metro bubbled up from a pit somewhere… but I’ve heard that it was mostly an executive level initiative.
Generally executive level people had pet teams/people that they deployed on these projects.