Word: microsoft
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...burdened with technicalities was Microsoft's Friday proposal to settle the government's case against it that a hoped-for weekend settlement was rendered all but impossible. Still, government lawyers, sifting through the complicated details, found several concessions that might allow CEO Steve Ballmer and Joel Klein, the government's chief antitrust officer, to meet and possibly put the matter to rest this week - before U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson rules in a case that was tried last year...
...face of it, Microsoft ought to have a tremendous head start in this area. It owns three of the top 10 PC games, including the world's best seller, Age of Empires II. But the fact is, there's a world of difference between PC games and console games. Because the technologies are so far apart, you won't be able to play PC games on your X-box--even though it runs on something similar to Windows 2000. And as X-box manager J. Allard concedes, PC gamers and console gamers are quite different animals: "Microsoft gets...
...history of console wars, however, is on Microsoft's side. Video gamers are such fickle creatures that no company has ever dominated the market for more than one generation of machines. Atari was supplanted by Sega, Sega nudged out by Nintendo, and Nintendo blown away by a company that had never before produced a games box: Sony. Indeed, Microsoft execs love to talk about how the PlayStation was seen as a no-hoper--until it caught the imagination of games developers and took off like a particularly speedy Crash Bandicoot. It's no accident that Microsoft is trying...
Mighty behemoths both, Microsoft and Sony have a lot of face to lose in this battle. It's always possible that they could share the bulk of the market, with Sega and Nintendo scrambling for leftovers. But the X-box has a good shot at success, despite the games handicap. Because it never has been a player in the console market, Microsoft is flying almost completely below the gaming press's radar. The Evil Empire has somehow morphed into the Rebel Alliance: plucky little engineers armed with blowtorches. It's going to be a long, sleepless...
...government funds that the average school district spends per pupil per year--the U.S. average is $6,500--and not only providing a superior education but also squeezing out a profit. That's a tough task in a field in which "the margins are more like McDonald's than Microsoft's," as Thomas Toch, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, puts...