JFD, here's some constructive, non-DOJ oriented discussion about MSFT and some of their future plans...
Subject 32453
Microsoft's Game Plan
By John C. Dvorak
MICROSOFT IS POISED TO DOMINATE THE $1.4 billion PC-game business, and it has moved into the number one position in online gaming, having pushed aside MPath, TEN and others. Curiously, nobody has noticed its emerging dominance. The company's gaming division is growing 40% annually and should continue to grow at the expense of the competition. Microsoft's next targets are Nintendo, Sony, Sega and the nearly $3 billion game-console business.
Microsoft first discovered its talent for gaming back in 1983, when it began selling Flight Simulator. Golfing games and other ideas were pursued with some success, but the company got caught up in the CD-ROM madness of the early 1990s, which resulted in a slew of embarrassing product failures and the dissolution of the Microsoft Home imprint. Minor setback. Things would change for the better in 1995 when the company moved game fan and 14-year veteran Ed Fries from the Microsoft Office division to head its entertainment business unit. Within five years Fries has made Microsoft one of the top PC-game-marketing companies. It currently has four titles in the top ten and clear leadership in online gaming, with 12 million registered users of its www.zone.com gaming site. At any one time there are at least 60,000 simultaneous players in the Zone.
Under Fries the head count in the division has gone from 150 to 550 and includes the illustrious Alexey Pajitnov, the Russian game designer responsible for Tetris. His contribution to Microsoft is the bestselling puzzle game Pandora's Box. The company has also acquired important game companies such as FASA Interactive, makers of MechWarrior, and Access Software, makers of Links LS, the top PC golf game in the world. Fries also made exclusive deals with others, including the Dallas-based Ensemble Studios, which developed the award-winning Age of Empires. The first iteration of the game and its sequels have sold more than 4 million copies.
Much of Microsoft's impetus comes from its having been snubbed by game designers. Over the past few years PC game designers tended to ignore the Windows operating system because it inevitably slowed down character movement and graphics rendering. The first few generations of run-and-shoot games such as Doom and Duke Nukem all loaded on a PC from DOS and then took over the machine's operations with proprietary code that bypassed Windows. None took advantage of Microsoft's Windows game drivers. The game designers felt that performance would suffer. Worse for Microsoft, future versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000, would basically be incompatible with DOS-booted games. Microsoft would risk seeing slower sales of Windows upgrades.
So by 1998 the company began funding the design of pure Windows-based games through acquisitions and exclusive publishing deals. The goal was to change the direction of the game industry. It worked. Now nearly every new PCgame runs on Windows and not on DOS.
Microsoft had to deal with another disturbing trend. Game-console companies were all talking about making the consoles work online and perhaps adding a keyboard so people could surf the Web using a Nintendo 64 or Sony PlayStation. If the consolemakers were going to invade what Microsoft considered its domain, then it would enter theirs with a game-console code-named X-Box. My sources tell me that the current iteration of this machine, still under wraps, consists of a 600MHz AMD Athlon, a graphics accelerator chip, an onboard DSP, a built-in modem, a DVD drive, a joystick/controller and a hard-disk subsystem. The whole thing will run under a trimmer, game-optimized version of Windows 2000. The hard-disk subsystem is what makes the console unique. It will store scores and game configurations, and allow online upgrades of disk-based games. The device is slated to ship in the third quarter of 2001, about a year after Sony launches its powerful new PlayStation 2 in the U.S.
Being a Windows box, it will make the porting of Windows-based PC games to the console unnecessary. PC games will become game-console games, thus saving publishers from redundant distribution and increasing the market reach for game designers. This is, in fact, an example of convergence. There is no reason Microsoft can't pull this off, and it looks as if the first victims of convergence will be the game-console companies. All of them.
Teflon |
