Sometimes, when I'm thinking of things to do besides study, I start thinking about what if scenarios. Not big complicated ones like "What if Hitler got into art school." or "What if bla bla bla" I tend to think more simply, and not I've thought up a rather interesting thing. What if Microsoft never got into the console arena? This may seem a bit simple, but I think that it may have some interesting views on Microsoft's impact. BTW, this may come off Fanboyish, but I'll try my best to remain objective.

1. Online play. (Aka, being swore at by people half as old as you)
This may/will be very debatable, but to the best of my knowledge, which, admittingly isn't very much, the PS2 and the GameCube were not very big players in the online market. I'm not saying that there were none, but before Xbox Live the main online place was PC gameing. Now however, all 3 consoles are set up to always be online, and online multiplayer is pretty much expected. This could, of course, also have to do with the fact that more people are getting high speed Internet and more stable connections, heh, as it's rather hard to play a fast paced game over dial-up.

2. Hard Drive (Aka, Death to memory cards!)
I am not a fan of memory cards in any form for consoles, I always found it ridiculous when I bought my first PS1 and PS2 that i had to pay an extra 30 bucks for a memory card, something that I thought should be build in, or at least come with the console. I mean, if you can't save, what's the point? But The Xbox had a built in hard drive, which I thought was the best idea since toast. That also enabled the games to have updates, which again, can be seen as a bonus or a sign that video game devs, wich previously had to have their games 100% or have to do a recall or something, could be a bit more lax in quality control. (KOTOR anyone?)

3. FPS (Aka, If it doesn't make normal people vomit, it's not fast enough)
This is probably a area that I'm going to get taken to task for, but for the life of me, I can't remember that many FPS on the PS2 and GameCube. There were a few, to be certain, but not nearly as many as there are now for the systems. This could be a reaction to Halo, or a reaction to the online portions of the games that I've mentioned earlier.

Anywho, that's my little list of things that may of been diffrent had Microsoft not jumped into the console ring. Enjoy!