Submitted by There are two drawbacks to being a company that has a virtual monopoly in its biggest markets. For starters: where do you find growth? And there is always the nagging worry that someone out there is working on a rival product that just might blow you out of the water. As Andrew Grove, one of the founders of computer chip giant Intel, once put it: “Only the paranoid survive!” Software giant Microsoft is working hard to address both problems.
…love to be “saddled” with the “disadvantages” of being a monopoly.
They can’t own the whole gaming & IT industry. They also can’t keep a monopoly up forever in a liberal economy – although things like patents and EEUU judgues that allow Microsoft to close the door for every other server OS because of their tight, propietary, closed couplement between windows clients (95% of the desktop market) and windows servers.
> They can’t own the whole gaming & IT industry.
With the kind of money and the sort of business practices they have, their level best is extremely tough.
>They can’t own the whole gaming & IT industry.
Agreed for IT, for the gaming industry I wouldn’t be so sure: when you have lots of money brought by huge cash cow (OS and Office), it’s a huge advantage, it’s quite possible that they could destroy Sony and Nintendo.
What worked for the Office suite could be repeated in the gaming industry, we’ll see.
it’s quite possible that they could destroy Sony and Nintendo.
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Nintendo is in a great position with their product where it will likely be the console of choice for Sony and Microsoft owners to pick up a second console.
As far as destroying Sony, its really not too tough when Sony makes some very poor decisions regarding the PS3.If anything its Sony’s arrogance that could cost them the console race. Also, it was apparently a real pain in the butt to deal with Sony since the PS2. Things were the same with Nintendo towards the end of the SNES. All the 3rd party publishers booked over to Sony once a viable alternative was around.
Anyways, heres how I see things shaking down:
U.S. – Xbox 360
Japan – Wii
Europe – XBox 360
1) XBox is WAY behind even PS2 in marketshare. 2) MSFT loses money on every XBox shipped. Thus; the assertion they will “own” this market is dubious (though I fully agree that XBox might have some nice games) and with the asserion that this market segment is *worth* owning. You have to sell a LOT of game software to make up for the hardware subsidy.
I believe that low cost CPU’s will eventually crowd dedicated game consoles out of the market. This is a controverial position, especially give that some people will pay $3000 for a PS3 on EBay, but, I believ, it will prove correct within a couple of years.
Not when you consider the result MS spending $20 Billion (according to article) only to have very few actual features from the “wish list” implemented on Vista (from a consumer standpoint, anyway).
We’ll see if their $20 Billion was well spent in the sales of Vista…
They’ll ship a lot of product, and Vista may well address some of the deficiencies in XP (even though you take a performance hit with Vista) but the fact remains that Vista is still way behind its competitors on a technical level.