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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sun-tzu who wrote (150491)	2/10/2002 12:38:53 PM
From: mishedlo	Respond to of 436258

Sun or anyone - what do you make of this XBOX thing? Personally I believe MSFT will be the only gorilla that will hold up (still not sure of the price). CSCO burnt toast INTC dry toast QCOM buttered toast perhaps those last two will be flipped ========================================================= Xbox is only the latest from the Microsoft stable of Trojan Horses Bill Gates is not Greek, but Microsoft's tactics are straight out of the Siege of Troy. If it's Greek to you then read on, and don't forget your loin cloth. While Sony and Nintendo played business as usual, Bill Gates walked up with his little red wagon and launched a battle for not only the future of games, but your living room. And he's winning -- 1.5 million of his weapons sit in living rooms across America. The weapon? Xbox. Just a game system? No. This thing is the future of home networking, and it appears Microsoft is light years ahead of Sony and Nintendo. Xbox is a full-on computer under the hood: memory, hard drive, motherboard, networking. The others are dedicated systems that lack a lot of the development tools that a PC-based game system provides. And PCs are finally fast enough to make gaming good. The move is classic Microsoft. Roll up a Trojan Horse into a new market and unleash it. Tech veterans will recall how Bill Gates many moons ago wrote a letter to "hobbyists" (this was in the 1970s and anyone playing with personal computing equipment was definitely a hobbyist) asking them to stop copying software. In those days software was free, it was hardware that serious people pursued. From there Gates and pal Paul Allen wrote Basic programs which they charged for and thus embarked knowingly or not on a career making Trojan Horses. Microsoft's Deuteronomy: Teenage angst begat Basic begat DOS which begat Word (for Apple first) which begat Excel which begat Windows which begat Office which begat Internet Explorer which begat Outlook Express which begat Messenger which begat .NET Passport. Some of these are brothers and sisters rather than offspring, but you get the idea. Each one was a Trojan Horse into a new area of computing. But of all of them, the new video game system Xbox could be the biggest weapon Microsoft has launched. This is the first time that it has a large-scale adoption (over 1.5 million units in mere months after debut) of a HARDWARE device. Up until now, Microsoft contented itself being a software-centric company, dabbling in services and content (i.e., MSN). With Xbox, Microsoft becomes a three-part company: software, hardware and services. Last fall, before its debut, we thought Xbox could be big. But it wasn't until fan reviews of Xbox came this year that we confirmed our belief. Many say it's better than Sony or Nintendo game systems. Microsoft's Trojan Horse Xbox affects these consumer electronics companies and entertainment giants: Sony, Philips, Nintendo, AOL Time Warner, Viacom, Vivendi Universal, Disney, News Corp, Bertelsmann, and GE (NBC). They should all study the Siege of Troy (which in this case represents our entertainment habits) and see how Microsoft was able to casually stroll into living rooms so easily. Xbox also poses a threat to the cable multiple systems operators: AT&T Cable (TCI), Cox, Comcast, Rogers, Jones Intercable, Charter, Cablevision. Gaming is one small step for this box. Since it's a PC it can network and control data in ways other game systems cannot. With so much flexibility available in the architecture, we can foresee the Xbox becoming a home entertainment controller (TV, radio, games, Web) in the not-so-distant future. Seventy million homes in the U.S. have cable TV. Those homes have boxes provided by the cable companies (MSOs). However, if users have an alternative box that just "happens" to be in the living room and does so many wonderful things like video games and Web... That path is already unfurling. Xbox is what Microsoft tried to do with WebTV: own the living room. Why? Because computing migrates from the desktop to the "lifetop" as a layer that surrounds our personal and business lives. Troy lives. siliconinvestor.com