4 ms·

To be fair, the last I read they turned a marginal profit on the 360 (earnings report from the EDD divsion) in January, but that isn't what gives them a $260 bi

To be fair, the last I read they turned a marginal profit on the 360 (earnings report from the EDD divsion) in January, but that isn't what gives them a $260 billion market cap. Compared to the profitability Nintendo has raked in through the Wii and DS it's anemic.

aston 19y ago
You're comparing fundamentally very different approaches to the game console industry. Nintendo must be profitable selling its consoles and software licenses in order to survive. The company ethos is letting people have fun and doing so in the most economically efficient way possible. Microsoft cares more about getting their hardware and software into America's homes. They don't want profit, they want a platform for content delivery. Both companies are doing pretty good right now.
- angstrom 19y ago
  I realize they're going about it in different ways. The focus was on the damage to the brand. As a brand, when people think Microsoft products they generally think "hold back and wait for the first service pack, the hardware refresh, or the 3rd product iteration". That's expensive when you rush something to market and the market doesn't bite because the product was rushed and the brand suffers. Under the Microsoft model that works because they have the cash reserves to burn through the flops and deadpans, but it damages the brand each time. In contrast, when people think Apple, Nintendo, Adobe, Google they tend to associate those brands with strong cost/value.
  - aston 19y ago
    I don't disagree in general. But. The Xbox is one of the few products that actually break the Microsoft trend. The first one was great and the second one was better as far as value provided to the consumer goes. Manufacturing problems make me suspect Microsoft hasn't figured out this whole hardware production thing (and they haven't), but the brand itself would only be tarnished if the Xbox 360 were fundamentally broken rather that just failing more often than the industry average. Hence why I claimed the Xbox 360 is not really comparable to Vista.
    - angstrom 19y ago
      I can agree with that, both as a consumer and a developer. Of the 3 consoles Xbox is the easiest/cheapest to develop for and the value of Xbox Live is certainly not to be overlooked.

aston 19y ago

You're comparing fundamentally very different approaches to the game console industry. Nintendo must be profitable selling its consoles and software licenses in order to survive. The company ethos is letting people have fun and doing so in the most economically efficient way possible. Microsoft cares more about getting their hardware and software into America's homes. They don't want profit, they want a platform for content delivery. Both companies are doing pretty good right now.

angstrom 19y ago
I realize they're going about it in different ways. The focus was on the damage to the brand. As a brand, when people think Microsoft products they generally think "hold back and wait for the first service pack, the hardware refresh, or the 3rd product iteration". That's expensive when you rush something to market and the market doesn't bite because the product was rushed and the brand suffers. Under the Microsoft model that works because they have the cash reserves to burn through the flops and deadpans, but it damages the brand each time. In contrast, when people think Apple, Nintendo, Adobe, Google they tend to associate those brands with strong cost/value.
- aston 19y ago
  I don't disagree in general. But. The Xbox is one of the few products that actually break the Microsoft trend. The first one was great and the second one was better as far as value provided to the consumer goes. Manufacturing problems make me suspect Microsoft hasn't figured out this whole hardware production thing (and they haven't), but the brand itself would only be tarnished if the Xbox 360 were fundamentally broken rather that just failing more often than the industry average. Hence why I claimed the Xbox 360 is not really comparable to Vista.
  - angstrom 19y ago
    I can agree with that, both as a consumer and a developer. Of the 3 consoles Xbox is the easiest/cheapest to develop for and the value of Xbox Live is certainly not to be overlooked.