Microsoft’s real competition: PC manufacturers

Written by

Mat Honan:

Microsoft’s biggest consumer success over the past decade has been Xbox. It needs to replicate that success, and the only way it can be assured of doing that, at least in the short term, is to screw its hardware partners.

I couldn’t agree more. For better or worse, Microsoft needs to go for it.



  • matthewmaurice

    Xbox may be a “success” with consumers, but it’s taken a long time and a lot of money to get there. If you look at the time value of the money Microsoft has spent over 15 years on the Xbox, I’m not sure they wouldn’t have earned a larger return by putting it in T-Bills instead and skipping the Xbox altogether. Imagine a “red ring of death”-type debacle with the Surface. What would happen then (aside from hysterical laughter by the OEMs)?

    • http://www.tumblr.com/blog/his-divine-shadow His Shadow

      True. The entertainment division lost billions, IIRC. I tire of the Xbox being hauled out as some kind of indication that Microsoft is good at hardware or that the Xbox is evidence that they can leverage their OS/Office monopoly. If anything, the Xbox is a counterexample in that the only way the Xbox succeeded is that it cut ties with Microsoft’s core businesses and went forward with new UI, hardware, software and concepts and struck deals with companies orthogonal to Microsoft’s core elements. If the Xbox was in any way Surface-like, Microsoft would have smothered the program under attempts to meld desktop gaming with a console, ending up with a noticeably worse experience in both arenas.

      Kudos to Microsoft for building an experience that the once mighty Sony is only now trying to emulate (an experience so endearing to users that they put up with a near 75% failure rate within 2 years in the form of the Red Ring of Death), but to use the Xbox as an indication that Microsoft can make the Surface a huge hit requires you also utterly erase the UMPC, the Kin, the Zune and the original tablet PCs from one’s memory.

    • http://twitter.com/torkelh Torkel

      I think a lot of analysts consider the XBox 360 a success because it’s seen as the market leader in the US. Even though it’s really second place to the Wii (and the original XBox was second place to the PS2 during that generation). In Europe and Japan the PS3 is outselling the 360 and the Wii is even more dominant.

      Too many tech reporters seem to forget that the rest of the world is a far bigger market than the US.

  • No

    All the profit in the PC have been taken by Microsoft and Intel. So the conclusion is Microsoft should make their own chips.

    • No

      or copy Apple.