Perhaps crazier words have never been typed, but hear me out.
As MS battles Nintendo and Sony in the console realm; a war whose prize is ‘the living room,’ a few things have been going unnoticed in Bill’s back yard.
1. Vista was a disaster. An unfocused mess that tried to include software for everything you could ever want to do with a PC. Yet Vista mastered none of those tasks. The gaming initiative supporting Vista, knows as ‘Games for Windows’ received a cold reception. A loose assortment of features that developers could pick and choose from, this initiative has yet to catch on. The rush of consumers eager to upgrade to Vista - like what happened at the Windows 95 launch - never materialized. MS could have done nothing and had the same OEM sales.
2. MS has taken its eyes off the ball. In this case the ball is the billion personal computers out there the majority of which run some MS software. They have become distracted waging war on multiple fronts: consoles, consumer electronics, enterprise software and even furniture. At this stage, splitting the Redmond beast is starting to look like a good idea, they are fighting on too many fronts with senior leadership that do not know how to win on these new battlefields.
3. The PC is moving into the living room. Media Center PCs continue to grow in popularity. For true media enthusiasts it is the most powerful and flexible platform for the living room. And only a PC has the power to run most its games at 1900*1080 - the consoles only accomplish this by running at lower resolutions and using a scaler chip which was always considered cheating before marketing machines turned this into a ‘feature.’
4. Casual games and MMO services are dwarfing the revenues of the traditional gaming market. So much so that true apples to apples comparisons are impossible because much of the revenue is not reported by NPD (the traditional source of sales stats). MS has barely any presence in this space.
5. PC game developers are openly expressing concern over Microsoft’s failure to support the venerable PC gaming cash cow. They are asking why MS got into the business of competing with itself. Since launching the XBox the PC has diminished, and MS still can not get to the top of the console world. They only recently started turning a profit.
I can understand trying to grow revenues by chasing new markets - when MS branched into the new stuff they were pretty much saturating the PC market. But I think its pretty important to maintain that strong base.
The MS foundation is eroding away.
