(thing) by Deadbolt Wed Sep 05 2001 at 15:47:03

I find myself in an unaccustomed position - I am willingly buying a Microsoft product on expectation that it will be the best of its kind.

Reasons why the Xbox has a fighting chance in the video game market:

  1. Microsoft has more money than it could ever spend. They can throw as much money at the Xbox as Sony or Nintendo can for their offerings. This means that Xbox doesn't have to make money immediately or even at all.
  2. The Xbox hardware is more or less a stripped-down, tweaked-out PC (a 10 gig HD, a DVD drive, 64 meg RAM, a PIII 733 MHz processor, an nVIDIA graphics card). It will run a modified Windows 2000 kernel and support DirectX. This hardware is very familiar to game developers and the transition from PC to Xbox will be almost painless for them. (Don't forget that programming games for consoles is much easier than for PCs -- with only one hardware setup, you can get it EXACTLY right.)
  3. The Xbox's RAM is a contiguous block of memory. By this I mean that it is not separated into different blocks for different functions as the PS2 does. Developers are able to allocate memory as needed depending on the needs of the game. This alone is making developers weep for joy.
  4. The Xbox HD will allow games to cache frequently used or extremely complex data. As everyone knows, reading data from a HD is much faster than reading off a disk (though still much slower than reading from core). This means much lower load times.
  5. Microsoft's record with hardware actually compares favorably to other companies. Their Sidewinder game pads and joysticks are highly thought of and their mice are pretty much everywhere. Since it never breaks, we don't hear about it, and that's a good thing for a piece of hardware.

Reasons why Xbox buyers are taking a risk:

  1. History shows that the video game market can only support two consoles. When the GameCube ships two weeks after the Xbox, there will be three offerings. One of these will fail. Microsoft is the new kid on the block and has to live down the reputation from Windows, so it has to have a flawless launch and a constant stream of good games to survive.
  2. Sony and Nintendo will probably ignore each other and attack the Xbox, correctly fearing Microsoft's immense marketing power. The GameCube is already underselling the Xbox and Sony will surely cut the PS2 down to $199 before the Xbox releases. Microsoft must justify the high price of its console.
  3. Although Microsoft has sworn up and down that Xbox will not be a Internet appliance or a PC, they still have to convince people of this. They don't want to ship a keyboard or mouse, but online gaming will suck without a keyboard.

Being a free software zealot, I hate Microsoft's attempts to dominate the OS market through mass proliferation of crappy software. I'd rather smash my head repeatedly into a stucco wall than use one of their OSes. But I don't mind paying for games or hardware, since they're toys and not life-essential software.

I like it!