Word: microsoft
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Give Gates credit. He and his company have correctly identified the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment industry in the world and hitched one of their many wagons to it. He's still willing to put down big bets when there's big action. And in this case Microsoft has managed to bind together cultural and technological trends in the same densely engineered overdetermined artifact. We tend to write off the past five years, the post-dotcom years, as a period of relative technological stagnation, especially when compared with the furious frenzy of Internet innovation that preceded it. But since...
Gates is anxious that the extent of his ambitions not be overstated: "Think of it as not taking over the digital ecosystem but being a prime player in that digital ecosystem." Duly noted. But the question remains: Is Microsoft about to do in the living room with the Xbox 360 what it did in the office with Windows? Will it create a technology so well positioned and well marketed and so devilishly useful that it becomes the de facto standard and creates an insanely profitable quasi-monopoly around itself? As music and movies become more and more digital, the entertainment...
...Xbox version 1.5," a Sony spokeswoman said recently. ("Kutaragi's good at rhetoric," Gates says of Sony PlayStation czar Ken Kutaragi.) For all the Xbox's underdog pluck, the PlayStation 2 still has an overwhelming hold on the $25 billion global video-game market: 68% at last count, to Microsoft's 17%; Nintendo has 15%, according to DFC Intelligence, a market-research firm. (See box, following page.) Microsoft doesn't come to the table with a handheld device like Sony's PSP or the Nintendo DS. It doesn't have the in-house multimedia expertise Sony has, or Nintendo...
Even beyond the world of video games, Microsoft is looking a tiny bit peaked. You wouldn't want to say that it's vulnerable, but last quarter Microsoft missed its earnings estimates by a whisker. Open-source gadflies like Linux and Firefox are chipping away at its market share in small but irritating ways. Google is making scary noises and hiring away its talent. Apple is winning rave reviews for its new operating system Tiger, which incorporates features that Microsoft was planning for the next version of Windows--which won't be out till 2006. Microsoft isn't going...
...trick going forward is for Microsoft to walk a delicate line between two opposing principles: openness and, for lack of a better word, closedness. Whoever is king of the living room will control the flow of 1s and 0s that very soon will make up the entire fabric of our living culture. That's a big responsibility, and a big test for any company--it's always tempting to use that kind of power to squeeze out the competition. If Xbox 360 were to take over your media cabinet, would it play DVDs with Sony Pictures movies on them...