In my opinion, Microsoft's Xbox-related announcements at CES 2008 was absolutely craptastic. Although Microsoft promised everyone a big Xbox announcement, all I heard were things I really didn't care about. Disney and ABC shows on Xbox Live? Who cares? I can only play them on my Xbox, so what good does that do me? Xbox Live reached 10 million customers? Awesome, but I notice you didn't mention anything about the service's reliability.
The announcement that made me the most angry was the announcement that British Telecom will begin using
Xbox 360s as "set-top boxes." So,
THIS is your big announcement? My 360 will now operate as a cable box? Oh, boy! That's just swell! </sarcasm>
I can't help feeling that Microsoft is trying to push the 360 into something the console is not ready for. As far as I can tell, the Xbox 360
still has a ridiculously high failure rate. I don't blame Microsoft for wanting to expand the market for the console, but I feel like they should be concentrating on fixing the Xbox Live scalability issues or effectively reducing the failure rate of the console.
The failure rate of the console really makes me wonder why British Telecom would want to implement this in the first place. Personally, I'm not very fond of the idea that my cable box may red ring during Hannah Montana.
Okay, Microsoft, why should you stop at cable boxes? You clearly want to expand the market for the 360, so let's be clever and think of some other awesome uses for the 360.
Perhaps the 360 could be used as replacements for the vital machines in hospitals? Not only will your vitals be monitored by three cores of processing power, you can stay caught up on all of the hottest titles. That sounds pretty good, but I don't think I need to tell everyone how I'd feel if the doctor came back and told me my girlfriend RRoD'd during the night and won't be collecting any more achievements.
The 360 could potentially be used as a navigation computer on space shuttles. If the console red rings, simply attach it to the outside of the space shuttle and re-enter Earth's atmosphere. It's kind of like doing the towel trick, except the outside of the space shuttle doesn't quite reach the temperature of the inside of the towel.
I'm out of sarcasm, so it's time to wrap this rant up. Tell me, fellow Dtoid users, does this announcement irritate any of you, or can you think of other awesome, cutting-edge uses for the 360?
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It's a video game console. Sure, the they're trying to tout it is a digital distribution media box, but what else could they possibly do to make your game experience even better with the current hardware?
Also, I do believe that they are addressing the 360's failure problems with better hardware, so in the future, the failure should go down substantially. What did you want? Honest question. What did you want from this release? It's a tech show, not E3.
Torches and pitchforks I'm selling dirt cheap..
who wants them?
@vexed alex-
I wanted technology. In the 360 sector, I heard about business deals.
Actually, I don't think your 360 will operate as a cable box. You'll probably have to get a new one. I'm not sure exactly what the current hardware is like, but there's not a very good way to pipe high-bandwidth video into the 360 for pass-through processing at the moment, is there?
"That sounds pretty good, but I don't think I need to tell everyone how I'd feel if the doctor came back and told me my girlfriend RRoD'd during the night and won't be collecting any more achievements."
Fucking EL OH EL.
there WAS no fucking announcement!!!
M$ is trying is darndest to get people who almost want a 360 to take the plunge and actually go buy one. Making the new 360's work as cable boxes is actually a brilliant way to go about that, especially in Japan where space constraints are more of an issue.
There are reasons why portable gaming is so big in Japan. One of those reasons is Japan is a country the size of California with something like a 1/3 of the population of the US living on it.
So for some people, this is a big deal. For you, not so much. And that's understandable.
Not surprisingly I had very low expectations for the MS announcement. Surprisingly one of the announcements did make me happy. The extended library added with the joining of new movie companies actually made me smile only because I see it as a step forward towards Digital Distribution. Granted the list isn't yet spectacular, but I am looking to it's future with more happiness than getting AppleTV.
Though this is a long shot, I am hoping that games will soon be part of the dling trend. Not so much from the Marketplace as I would prefer getting it from a local retailer onto a memory disk (faster dl). I guess time will tell.
Another announcement I was hoping for was being able to external hard drives to extend the current HDD's on the 360's. We all know we're getting screwed on that... but again a long shot.
I'd have to disagree with the high failure rate fo 360s now, its not near as bad, not even close.