7 ms·

IMO, the amazing thing about the 360 was how they were able to successfully continue selling it in spite of having the ring of death issues[0]. I know people wh

IMO, the amazing thing about the 360 was how they were able to successfully continue selling it in spite of having the ring of death issues[0]. I know people who would go and buy a new machine when theirs died without thinking about it twice. One even gave me their 360 when the ONE came out. Microsoft sure knows how to build brand loyalty. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems

FussyZeus 11y ago
Speaking as a 360 owner, I think it had more to do with a really good selection of launch exclusive titles that kept people coming back. The original gen 1's were not of great quality at all, even beyond the RROD issues the console felt cheap and poorly made, the power supplies were insanely large and generated a ton of heat, etc. Microsoft sold the 360 with good exclusives, which is what Sony then did with the PS4 while Microsoft bumbled around trying to be the center of your living room, like Sony did in turn with the PS3 (and why it had similar issues the One now has). To be fair: The Elites that came about later on were a MASSIVE improvement. The originals were the low bidder manufacturer and it showed, and I think M$ learned from that. Despite it's software issues (which I've gone to at length in other threads) the One does feel like solid hardware and good build quality.
- asimuvPR 11y ago
  I never really understood Microsoft wanting to be the center of the living room. Its just a weird concept to me.
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    The living room is typically the biggest screen in people's homes, the screen they spend the most time with, and the screen they are the "fondest" for as it is the home for much of their entertainment. Why wouldn't Microsoft want to be at the center of that? Microsoft wants to "own" all of your screens, by being the friendly operating system and development tool provider for them, so of course the battle of the living room is huge for them.
    - asimuvPR 11y ago
      Yes, that's a good point, and I get that. But these days there are more smaller screens that they don't control because their mobile phone strategy was a huge failure. I would focus on controlling the smaller screens because that's where most entertainment and things happen. Typing this from my android phone.
      - WorldMaker 11y ago
        I have so many opinions on this and could quickly devolve this into a long winded tangent, but the short answer is: Yes, there are many screens and Microsoft clearly has strategies for all the fronts, mobile included. Also, just because Microsoft is down, don't count them out just yet in the mobile screen front. Microsoft has the best leverage right now, of any company/platform, to turn wins on any screen into possible gains in all of them... Microsoft Lumia owner and fan
        asimuvPR 11y ago
        I wanted a Windows phone. The GUI was so nice. But they sort of give up. Knowing MS, they are probably cooking something now that they are in the embrace stage of their business plan.
        FussyZeus 11y ago
        I owned a Lumia Icon for about a year not terribly long ago, about the time WP 8.1 came out. My observations: - The Update system was extremely confusing, I had a hell of a time just figuring out how to update to 8.1, including needing a firmware update, figuring out how to apply a firmware update, then doing it three times over because I had that many. While the system eventually notified me of the system update, it remained silent on the firmware. - The UI language was fantastic, seriously I loved the way the phone handles information. The only issue there is that many apps like Facebook and what have you totally ignored it, and Microsoft let them on anyway. What good is building a UI like that if you're going to let the developers just do whatever they want anyway? - The app store in general is extremely limited. I realize Microsoft can't do anything here but I'm holding them partially responsible because of how late they were to this game. - My Icon would get very hot with only regular use. A quick flip through twitter or even just some websites and the back of the device became uncomfortably warm. - The keyboard is AMAZING. Seriously Microsoft knocked it out of the park on that one. - The device felt well built and (aside of the heat issues) never presented as though it was poorly made. Connectors were solid, battery life was very good, and the bright colored interfaces with the white-on-black text make it genuinely a pleasure to use. Eventually I had to face reality and bail (too limited on capabilities, plus I'm an iOS developer and at the time they just released the 6, the first decently sized iPhone) and went that way. That said should I change careers I'd definitely look the Windows Phone way again.
  - developer2 11y ago
    I think the "aha!" moment for this is, today, still another 30-50 or even many more years away. I could ramble on for hours as to what I want the future to look like, but suffice it to say it really would be what we generally refer to now as the "automated home of the future". The largest obstacle right now is branding and current technology. Every individual company is vying to meet all your needs. Microsoft wants you to have a "Microsoft Home", Apple want you to live in your "Apple Home", Google the "Google Home", etc. This is not the future. The future, done right, requires seamless integration of all the devices we will own. To the point where we stop thinking of everything as even being a separate device. A single system that blissfully handles your entire home life. The current situation is laughable. Existing devices in this space are designed as standalone items, which may or may not even be meant to integrate with other devices. The "standards" that have been brought to life thus far are... ugh. Just no! I will be satisfied the day I can turn every wall into a touch display, with wireless speakers everywhere. Every lightbulb, every speaker, every appliance, every goddamn little thing seamlessly integrated into one beautiful system. No push-and-pull of different standards trying to fight for a place in my home. No separate apps on a stupid smartphone depending on what I want to control. Microsoft's example with wanting to be the "home media center" is such an insignificantly tiny part of the whole puzzle. A TV and a set-top box gets me nothing of what I want for the future. They only have their eyes set on media consumption, what you will pay for to download and watch/play on their stupid service. It has nothing to do with actually being the center of your home, only the center of your living room spending habits. I'm so disappointed with how slowly things are moving along. Computing is still in its infancy, and we haven't really advanced very far at all. We need a few true visionaries and inventors to come along and make things start to happen. So far, we've got nothing worthy of being called amazing. tldr; I don't want a home media center. I want Jarvis dammit. Actually, I want more than Jarvis. And fuck 4K TV; I want to skip ahead to 1024K wall surfaces that you can look at with a fkn microscope and not tell the difference between a display and reality. ;)
    - asimuvPR 11y ago
      Weird, I'm actually building a system to do just that. Alpha should be out in early May.
  - FussyZeus 11y ago
    I totally get the concept, the problem is the execution is always terrible. The one has extremely similar problems to the PS3 because they both try to be a ton of things they didn't need to be. The PS4 is much better, Sony learned it was better to be great at one thing than to be ok at one thing and suck at a whole bunch of other things, and hopefully Microsoft will learn that too.
  - chipsy 11y ago
    It's brought on by being a big company that wants to leverage existing customer bases into new markets. Both Sony and Microsoft engaged in the "platform strategy" in the last two generations, while Nintendo sat back making traditional gaming consoles, focusing on building their own market rather than invading an existing one. Basically, the console brand, to MS and Sony, is ultimately a tool that can be used to build a potentially bigger empire. Share and revenue prospects come before whether the experience makes sense, and in the echo chambers of such large companies, it's easy to fashion a story where every consumer is hungry for all of this stuff and wants a single source to deliver it.
chaostheory 11y ago
Microsoft can thank Peter Moore for doing the right thing http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-02-peter-moore-recounts-xbox-360-red-ring-of-death-saga http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-02-peter-moore-rec... He made XBox customers happy with the added extended warranty but it cost MS over $1 billion, so he was ousted. From another perspective, one can also blame him for rushing out the 360 too early, but then that's how MS was able to gain market share at the expense of both Sony (temporarily) and Nintendo.
- asimuvPR 11y ago
  Ultimately, it might give them the edge now that they are going all open source-y. You don't really need to think very hard and see the Xbox ONE as a hub for home IoT devices. And Nintendo. It pains me to see such the company that brought me so many wonderful memories (still does) get turned into a minor console player. Thanks Zeus they have the DS.
- blktiger 11y ago
  MS was really generous with how they handled defective devices. I had a friend call MS because his 360 broke 4 YEARS after he purchased it and they still fixed it.
draw_down 11y ago
Maybe... but I saw recently that the PS4 is outselling the Xbox One two-to-one. I'm not on top of that world enough to know all the reasons why, but the "ring of death" could be one.
- Aleman360 11y ago
  That's more likely explained by the fact that PS4 launched $100 cheaper and is more powerful.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    Its more about brand recognition than anything else. Now they are at parity pricing and they still dont close the gap.
- bitserf 11y ago
  After having had my original XBox fail once and XBox 360 needing to be replaced three times, and eventually still dying, with Microsoft refusing to replace the third, I switched to PS3, and now PS4. I will never buy Microsoft hardware again, ever. So, yeah, that is definitely a factor in my case.
- gcb0 11y ago
  PS4 launched cheaper. And sony was way more aggressive on sales. all my friends that do have PS4s got them for 'free' when buying a new TV.
- clouddrover 11y ago
  VGChartz has console sales figures: http://www.vgchartz.com/ http://www.vgchartz.com/
- sangnoir 11y ago
  Microsoft badly bungled the launch of the XBox One by making several unpopular decisions, including non-resellable games and others I can't recall. Sony's announcement was a few days later and they basically said "the PS4 will be are doing the opposite of everything that Xbone is". Microsoft backtracked later, but the Xbone was tainted and the mindshare battle was already lost.
MichaelGG 11y ago
Is that why they can bombard the entire UI with ads? Every single page has tons of ads, and MS misleadingly only notes one of them as "Advertisement" (autoplay video). I disconnected my Xbox360 from the Internet because it's faster that way, and cleaner. I see the Xbox One is pretty bad, too, and this "ads everywhere" has leaked into Windows 10 (though you can turn them off a bit).
- pdabbadabba 11y ago
  > this "ads everywhere" has leaked into Windows 10 (though you can turn them off a bit). Where? I've been using Windows 10 everyday for months and haven't seen an ad. There was that one time that something resembling a Tomb Raider ad was served to users' lock screens, but I never saw it myself and I've never seen anything else. Maybe it depends on which version of Windows 10?
  - Eric_WVGG 11y ago
    lock screen, start menu, "growl" notifications…
    - arcticfox 11y ago
      You're really making a mountain out of a molehill, I can hardly find ads on W10 if I try. Never actually noticed one before.
      - nitrogen 11y ago
        Maybe they're just really subtle ads, and thus (to some) more insidious?
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Mainly the start menu. Just because they aren't "random ads" like a Coke video, doesn't mean they aren't ads. Showing offers to buy software is definitely an ad. I think there's pop-ups for Office as well as pre installed "apps" that are just links to buy.
pdabbadabba 11y ago
For many, I think there was a pretty simple explanation: Halo. The hardware was a little iffy, but XBox has always had the mother of all console exclusives upon which to build their ecosystem. (Though the significance of the Halo franchise seems to have faded a bit in recent years.)
- remarkEon 11y ago
  Yeah Halo was it for me, and probably the only real reason I own an Xbox One (although we'll just say that Halo 5 leaves something to be desired...) I think Microsoft has stumbled recently with console exclusives. A lot of people felt that Titanfall[1] was kind of a bait and switch. People paid $60 or whatever for what was essentially a multiplayer-only game. (The sequel will not be an Xbox exclusive.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanfall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanfall
- Unklejoe 11y ago
  Halo is what sold me. Also, I was "in to computers", so the fact that Microsoft was making a video game console was pretty cool to me. I was 11 years old when the first Halo game came out, and I got the original XBox/Halo for Christmas that same year. Before that, I was playing Final Fight on Sega CD. So going from that to Halo was a real eye opener. I had never experienced emotion like that in a video game before. The music was EPIC, the story line was immersive, and the graphics were excellent for the time. Halo is considered (by me) to be the first game of the new era. Sure, there were other successful "3D" FPS games that were out before Halo, but the original Halo hit all the marks and was the first taste of modern gaming for a lot of people. Many of my friends went from playing Mario/Sonic/etc... straight to Halo. It represented a massive leap in graphics quality, so much so that even games of today don't look _much_ better than Halo to me. Halo is the only reason I purchased an XBox 360 and XBox One.
emehrkay 11y ago
There has to be some sort of record set with regard to the number of units sold vs the chances the unit would fail. It seems like everyone's xbox 360 would fail, no one was immune.
brudgers 11y ago
I have a first generation Xbox 360. Microsoft repaired the RRoD three times under warranty. The fourth time it RRoD'd was out of warranty and so it sat for a couple of years. Later I fixed with about $15 worth of parts [1] in an afternoon. It's still running after 10 years with the same 20gig hard disk. Analyzing my experience, the out of band warranty extension is a feature of an underlying value Microsoft placing on gaming. It's not just that the repairs were the right way to make something that was going to suck suck less. It's that the core proposition of the Xbox 360 was that the experience of using it would keep getting better and that it would get better because games would get better. Playing FIFA 16 is better than playing FIFA 12 was better than playing FIFA 07. Beyond that, the software keeps getting better because Microsoft values developers. They're not all just share croppers who pay 30% to enter a downward race toward ninety-nine cents. [1] 8 cheeseheads, a tube of thermal paste, and a sheet of .070. aluminum from the hobby shoppe.

FussyZeus 11y ago

Speaking as a 360 owner, I think it had more to do with a really good selection of launch exclusive titles that kept people coming back. The original gen 1's were not of great quality at all, even beyond the RROD issues the console felt cheap and poorly made, the power supplies were insanely large and generated a ton of heat, etc. Microsoft sold the 360 with good exclusives, which is what Sony then did with the PS4 while Microsoft bumbled around trying to be the center of your living room, like Sony did in turn with the PS3 (and why it had similar issues the One now has). To be fair: The Elites that came about later on were a MASSIVE improvement. The originals were the low bidder manufacturer and it showed, and I think M$ learned from that. Despite it's software issues (which I've gone to at length in other threads) the One does feel like solid hardware and good build quality.

asimuvPR 11y ago
I never really understood Microsoft wanting to be the center of the living room. Its just a weird concept to me.
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  The living room is typically the biggest screen in people's homes, the screen they spend the most time with, and the screen they are the "fondest" for as it is the home for much of their entertainment. Why wouldn't Microsoft want to be at the center of that? Microsoft wants to "own" all of your screens, by being the friendly operating system and development tool provider for them, so of course the battle of the living room is huge for them.
  - asimuvPR 11y ago
    Yes, that's a good point, and I get that. But these days there are more smaller screens that they don't control because their mobile phone strategy was a huge failure. I would focus on controlling the smaller screens because that's where most entertainment and things happen. Typing this from my android phone.
    - WorldMaker 11y ago
      I have so many opinions on this and could quickly devolve this into a long winded tangent, but the short answer is: Yes, there are many screens and Microsoft clearly has strategies for all the fronts, mobile included. Also, just because Microsoft is down, don't count them out just yet in the mobile screen front. Microsoft has the best leverage right now, of any company/platform, to turn wins on any screen into possible gains in all of them... Microsoft Lumia owner and fan
      - asimuvPR 11y ago
        I wanted a Windows phone. The GUI was so nice. But they sort of give up. Knowing MS, they are probably cooking something now that they are in the embrace stage of their business plan.
      - FussyZeus 11y ago
        I owned a Lumia Icon for about a year not terribly long ago, about the time WP 8.1 came out. My observations: - The Update system was extremely confusing, I had a hell of a time just figuring out how to update to 8.1, including needing a firmware update, figuring out how to apply a firmware update, then doing it three times over because I had that many. While the system eventually notified me of the system update, it remained silent on the firmware. - The UI language was fantastic, seriously I loved the way the phone handles information. The only issue there is that many apps like Facebook and what have you totally ignored it, and Microsoft let them on anyway. What good is building a UI like that if you're going to let the developers just do whatever they want anyway? - The app store in general is extremely limited. I realize Microsoft can't do anything here but I'm holding them partially responsible because of how late they were to this game. - My Icon would get very hot with only regular use. A quick flip through twitter or even just some websites and the back of the device became uncomfortably warm. - The keyboard is AMAZING. Seriously Microsoft knocked it out of the park on that one. - The device felt well built and (aside of the heat issues) never presented as though it was poorly made. Connectors were solid, battery life was very good, and the bright colored interfaces with the white-on-black text make it genuinely a pleasure to use. Eventually I had to face reality and bail (too limited on capabilities, plus I'm an iOS developer and at the time they just released the 6, the first decently sized iPhone) and went that way. That said should I change careers I'd definitely look the Windows Phone way again.
- developer2 11y ago
  I think the "aha!" moment for this is, today, still another 30-50 or even many more years away. I could ramble on for hours as to what I want the future to look like, but suffice it to say it really would be what we generally refer to now as the "automated home of the future". The largest obstacle right now is branding and current technology. Every individual company is vying to meet all your needs. Microsoft wants you to have a "Microsoft Home", Apple want you to live in your "Apple Home", Google the "Google Home", etc. This is not the future. The future, done right, requires seamless integration of all the devices we will own. To the point where we stop thinking of everything as even being a separate device. A single system that blissfully handles your entire home life. The current situation is laughable. Existing devices in this space are designed as standalone items, which may or may not even be meant to integrate with other devices. The "standards" that have been brought to life thus far are... ugh. Just no! I will be satisfied the day I can turn every wall into a touch display, with wireless speakers everywhere. Every lightbulb, every speaker, every appliance, every goddamn little thing seamlessly integrated into one beautiful system. No push-and-pull of different standards trying to fight for a place in my home. No separate apps on a stupid smartphone depending on what I want to control. Microsoft's example with wanting to be the "home media center" is such an insignificantly tiny part of the whole puzzle. A TV and a set-top box gets me nothing of what I want for the future. They only have their eyes set on media consumption, what you will pay for to download and watch/play on their stupid service. It has nothing to do with actually being the center of your home, only the center of your living room spending habits. I'm so disappointed with how slowly things are moving along. Computing is still in its infancy, and we haven't really advanced very far at all. We need a few true visionaries and inventors to come along and make things start to happen. So far, we've got nothing worthy of being called amazing. tldr; I don't want a home media center. I want Jarvis dammit. Actually, I want more than Jarvis. And fuck 4K TV; I want to skip ahead to 1024K wall surfaces that you can look at with a fkn microscope and not tell the difference between a display and reality. ;)
  - asimuvPR 11y ago
    Weird, I'm actually building a system to do just that. Alpha should be out in early May.
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  I totally get the concept, the problem is the execution is always terrible. The one has extremely similar problems to the PS3 because they both try to be a ton of things they didn't need to be. The PS4 is much better, Sony learned it was better to be great at one thing than to be ok at one thing and suck at a whole bunch of other things, and hopefully Microsoft will learn that too.
- chipsy 11y ago
  It's brought on by being a big company that wants to leverage existing customer bases into new markets. Both Sony and Microsoft engaged in the "platform strategy" in the last two generations, while Nintendo sat back making traditional gaming consoles, focusing on building their own market rather than invading an existing one. Basically, the console brand, to MS and Sony, is ultimately a tool that can be used to build a potentially bigger empire. Share and revenue prospects come before whether the experience makes sense, and in the echo chambers of such large companies, it's easy to fashion a story where every consumer is hungry for all of this stuff and wants a single source to deliver it.

chaostheory 11y ago

Microsoft can thank Peter Moore for doing the right thing http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-02-peter-moore-recounts-xbox-360-red-ring-of-death-saga http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-02-peter-moore-rec... He made XBox customers happy with the added extended warranty but it cost MS over $1 billion, so he was ousted. From another perspective, one can also blame him for rushing out the 360 too early, but then that's how MS was able to gain market share at the expense of both Sony (temporarily) and Nintendo.

asimuvPR 11y ago
Ultimately, it might give them the edge now that they are going all open source-y. You don't really need to think very hard and see the Xbox ONE as a hub for home IoT devices. And Nintendo. It pains me to see such the company that brought me so many wonderful memories (still does) get turned into a minor console player. Thanks Zeus they have the DS.
blktiger 11y ago
MS was really generous with how they handled defective devices. I had a friend call MS because his 360 broke 4 YEARS after he purchased it and they still fixed it.

draw_down 11y ago

Maybe... but I saw recently that the PS4 is outselling the Xbox One two-to-one. I'm not on top of that world enough to know all the reasons why, but the "ring of death" could be one.

Aleman360 11y ago
That's more likely explained by the fact that PS4 launched $100 cheaper and is more powerful.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Its more about brand recognition than anything else. Now they are at parity pricing and they still dont close the gap.
bitserf 11y ago
After having had my original XBox fail once and XBox 360 needing to be replaced three times, and eventually still dying, with Microsoft refusing to replace the third, I switched to PS3, and now PS4. I will never buy Microsoft hardware again, ever. So, yeah, that is definitely a factor in my case.
gcb0 11y ago
PS4 launched cheaper. And sony was way more aggressive on sales. all my friends that do have PS4s got them for 'free' when buying a new TV.
clouddrover 11y ago
VGChartz has console sales figures: http://www.vgchartz.com/ http://www.vgchartz.com/
sangnoir 11y ago
Microsoft badly bungled the launch of the XBox One by making several unpopular decisions, including non-resellable games and others I can't recall. Sony's announcement was a few days later and they basically said "the PS4 will be are doing the opposite of everything that Xbone is". Microsoft backtracked later, but the Xbone was tainted and the mindshare battle was already lost.

MichaelGG 11y ago

Is that why they can bombard the entire UI with ads? Every single page has tons of ads, and MS misleadingly only notes one of them as "Advertisement" (autoplay video). I disconnected my Xbox360 from the Internet because it's faster that way, and cleaner. I see the Xbox One is pretty bad, too, and this "ads everywhere" has leaked into Windows 10 (though you can turn them off a bit).

pdabbadabba 11y ago
> this "ads everywhere" has leaked into Windows 10 (though you can turn them off a bit). Where? I've been using Windows 10 everyday for months and haven't seen an ad. There was that one time that something resembling a Tomb Raider ad was served to users' lock screens, but I never saw it myself and I've never seen anything else. Maybe it depends on which version of Windows 10?
- Eric_WVGG 11y ago
  lock screen, start menu, "growl" notifications…
  - arcticfox 11y ago
    You're really making a mountain out of a molehill, I can hardly find ads on W10 if I try. Never actually noticed one before.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      Maybe they're just really subtle ads, and thus (to some) more insidious?
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Mainly the start menu. Just because they aren't "random ads" like a Coke video, doesn't mean they aren't ads. Showing offers to buy software is definitely an ad. I think there's pop-ups for Office as well as pre installed "apps" that are just links to buy.

pdabbadabba 11y ago

For many, I think there was a pretty simple explanation: Halo. The hardware was a little iffy, but XBox has always had the mother of all console exclusives upon which to build their ecosystem. (Though the significance of the Halo franchise seems to have faded a bit in recent years.)

remarkEon 11y ago
Yeah Halo was it for me, and probably the only real reason I own an Xbox One (although we'll just say that Halo 5 leaves something to be desired...) I think Microsoft has stumbled recently with console exclusives. A lot of people felt that Titanfall[1] was kind of a bait and switch. People paid $60 or whatever for what was essentially a multiplayer-only game. (The sequel will not be an Xbox exclusive.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanfall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanfall
Unklejoe 11y ago
Halo is what sold me. Also, I was "in to computers", so the fact that Microsoft was making a video game console was pretty cool to me. I was 11 years old when the first Halo game came out, and I got the original XBox/Halo for Christmas that same year. Before that, I was playing Final Fight on Sega CD. So going from that to Halo was a real eye opener. I had never experienced emotion like that in a video game before. The music was EPIC, the story line was immersive, and the graphics were excellent for the time. Halo is considered (by me) to be the first game of the new era. Sure, there were other successful "3D" FPS games that were out before Halo, but the original Halo hit all the marks and was the first taste of modern gaming for a lot of people. Many of my friends went from playing Mario/Sonic/etc... straight to Halo. It represented a massive leap in graphics quality, so much so that even games of today don't look _much_ better than Halo to me. Halo is the only reason I purchased an XBox 360 and XBox One.

emehrkay 11y ago

There has to be some sort of record set with regard to the number of units sold vs the chances the unit would fail. It seems like everyone's xbox 360 would fail, no one was immune.

brudgers 11y ago

I have a first generation Xbox 360. Microsoft repaired the RRoD three times under warranty. The fourth time it RRoD'd was out of warranty and so it sat for a couple of years. Later I fixed with about $15 worth of parts [1] in an afternoon. It's still running after 10 years with the same 20gig hard disk. Analyzing my experience, the out of band warranty extension is a feature of an underlying value Microsoft placing on gaming. It's not just that the repairs were the right way to make something that was going to suck suck less. It's that the core proposition of the Xbox 360 was that the experience of using it would keep getting better and that it would get better because games would get better. Playing FIFA 16 is better than playing FIFA 12 was better than playing FIFA 07. Beyond that, the software keeps getting better because Microsoft values developers. They're not all just share croppers who pay 30% to enter a downward race toward ninety-nine cents. [1] 8 cheeseheads, a tube of thermal paste, and a sheet of .070. aluminum from the hobby shoppe.