Tag Archives | Microsoft

Windows 7 House Parties = Astroturfing

Posted by David Worthington on September 3, 2009 at 8:32 pm

People are not lining up outside of storefronts at midnight to buy Windows anymore, but that won’t stop Microsoft from creating the impression that the masses are fawning over Windows 7. The company is asking people to host house parties when the OS launches on Oct. 22. The Potemkin village has become the Potemkin house party.

Microsoft has adopted a PR technique that many large corporations and interests groups use to advance their positions in the absence of any significant public support: astroturfing. Astroturfing is a PR technique that is used to manufacture the impression of grassroots behavior. There are many examples of it being utilized to affect public policy.

Taking a handful of launch parties, and making it seem as if they are a widespread phenomenon would be astroturfing. I would not be surprised if that is what Microsoft has in mind. Many reporters will fall for it.

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Oh, Just Tell Us the Xbox 360 Failure Rate Already!

Posted by Jared Newman on September 2, 2009 at 5:11 pm

redringofdeathAnother day, another stab at the Xbox 360’s failure rate.

This time, the estimate comes from Square Trade (PDF), a third-party electronics warranty company. Based on customer reports, the company says Microsoft’s game console has a 23.7 percent chance of dying within two years of purchase. Half the errors reported to Square Trade involved the infamous Red Ring of Death.

Overall, the Xbox 360’s one in four chance of failure makes it far and away the most unreliable console on the market. By comparison, 10 percent of Playstation 3s were defective, and 2.7 percent of Wiis needed repair.

SquareTrade is the same company that in February 2008 said the Xbox 360 has a 16.4 percent failure rate, and we’ve seen other estimaes all over the map. In 2007, GamePro talked to some EB Games and Best Buy employees, who generally estimated that a third of all Xbox 360s had to be sent back for repair. More recently, Game Informer conducted a poll of readers, 54.2 percent of whom said they’ve dealt with an Xbox 360 hardware failure.

The funny thing is, you tend to be skeptical of such high estimates until the Red Ring of Death happens to you. My Xbox 360 kicked the bucket a few weeks ago, and suddenly I started realizing how many friends have gone through the same thing. If someone told me that 99 percent of Xbox 360s were bound to die within 10 years of ownership, I’d be skeptical of the claim, but not overly surprised if it turned out to be true.

Which is why I’d like Microsoft to come clean. Let’s clear the air of all these wildly speculative failure rate estimates and get some precise numbers and facts in order. If I treat my console right, can I expect it to last forever? If not, how long is it before every press of the power button is a crapshoot? And what are the odds that the Xbox 360 will outlast the three-year warranty that comes with every new console purchase?

Of course, I’d be foolish to expect such transparency out of the blue, but I doubt the truth could be much worse than third-party guesstimates and anecdotes. Or is it?

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Microsoft’s Move to Axe Much of Zune Line Risky

Posted by Ed Oswald on September 2, 2009 at 6:07 am

Zune HDMicrosoft is going full-bore when it comes to the Zune HD, due out in stores September 15. Redmond apparently believes so much in the product that it is willing to axe the entire line to focus on the device, if reports from Paul Thurrott are to be believed.

Now Mr. Thurrott does not necessarily have the best track record in being accurate in predicting or reporting future Microsoft moves, but if he’s actually talking to executives you have got to think they aren’t blowing smoke. If true, it’s a pretty gutsy move on Microsoft’s park to put all their eggs in one basket.

[UPDATE: Microsoft has now confirmed that the original Zunes are dead. See this PC World story.]

Even though Apple seems to be focusing on touch as of late, the company still carries an expansive line of models to suit users tastes. Simply put, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work well in this market.

Apple’s Shuffles and Nanos work good for athletes — look no further than the Nike+ add-on for the Nano as evidence. For Microsoft, the Zune 8 fufilled this niche. With it gone, the company is forcing users to upgrade to the much larger (and about 2 1/2 times more expensive) touch-based model.

In Microsoft’s defense, we all shouldn’t forget though how much ground the Zune needs to make up. Even though this latest round of Zunes sold slightly better, there is still a 20-25:1 ratio of iPods sold to every Zune  Microsoft is focusing its efforts where the market is going.

Regardless, a large portion of the market will be underserved. Many consumers prefer smaller and cheaper players (anecdotal evidence seems to indicate this may be a fairly large chunk of all players sold). I can understand Microsoft’s desire to focus on the Zune HD, but deciding to axe the rest of your product line before you have any alternatives seems way too risky for a platform that is hanging on by a thread so as it is.

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Why Shadow Complex’s Impressive Sales Matter

Posted by Jared Newman on September 1, 2009 at 7:51 pm

shadow.complexDuring the first week after Microsoft released Shadow Complex for the Xbox 360, something extraordinary happened: Over 200,000 people plunked down $20 $15 to download the game.

That makes Shadow Complex — an exploration-themed shooter in the same vein as the classic Metroid — the most downloaded single-player Xbox Live Arcade game to date. Compared to boxed retail games, 200,000 sales for a downloadable game isn’t too shabby, either.

There are a few reasons why this is important news. Foremost, at $20 $15, Shadow Complex is expensive for an Xbox Live Arcade game. Prices for these downloadable games have been trending upwards lately, not because Microsoft is gouging its customers, but because the games themselves are becoming more substantial. To put it another way, they’re worth the money you pay for them, and the big numbers for Shadow Complex prove that this trend is worthwhile.

Shadow Complex is also a bigger game, in megabytes, than its peers. For a long time, Microsoft restricted the size of Xbox Live Arcade games to 50 MB. This allowed all games to fit on a memory card so Xbox 360 owners who didn’t buy a hard drive could play along, but it put constraints on game development. Since then, Microsoft has slowly let the size of Xbox Live Arcade games creep upwards. Shadow Complex measures 835 MB, and its strong sales show that Xbox Live Arcade games don’t necessarily need to hold back in file size to be successful.

Finally, Shadow Complex is a good, long-lasting game that returns to the 2-D platforming style of the NES and SNES era. It’s not retro, per se, nor is it a cash-in on an old franchise or a casual game with Wii Sports-like appeal, but it nonetheless caught the interest of Xbox 360 owners. Marketing and hype certainly helped, but so did uniformly positive reviews.

With the cost of big-budget game development spiraling upwards, the games industry is practically killing itself. Smaller, downloadable games could be the way out, provided they’re substantial enough to satisfy hungrier gamers. With all this in mind, we should be expecting and hoping for more games like Shadow Complex.

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Bing Ads Prompt Lawsuit

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 27, 2009 at 12:11 pm

Advertising Age is reporting that a Delaware company is suing Microsoft’s ad agency over ads for Bing that were integrated into the TV show The Philanthropist. I’m not a big prime-time watcher, so this is the first I’ve heard of this:

Commercials for Bing were filmed on-set using actors from the show, which made its debut this summer and stars James Purefoy and Neve Campbell. The Bing-themed ads appeared between the TV programming and regular commercial breaks.

Still unclear: Why this idea is patentable in the first place, or how it’s fundamentally different from the ads that were deeply embedded into old radio shows–I mean, Jack Benny and pals not only discussed Jello every week, but the Benny program was named after the stuff.

[Full discloure: Bing is a Technologizer advertiser.]

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Xbox 360 Slim? How About Xbox 360 Natal?

Posted by Jared Newman on August 24, 2009 at 4:04 pm

xbox360_slim_mockupWith the Playstation 3 looking slimmer and cheaper than ever, all eyes are on Microsoft to retaliate. Rather than speculate on its own, IndustryGamers polled some of gaming’s crystal ball-holding analysts to find out what they thought.

The question: Do you think Microsoft will release an Xbox 360 Slim?

The response was mixed, with a few strong “yays” and “nays” on each side. That’s to be expected, but what surprised me was how only one analyst, Broadpoint AmTech’s Ben Schachter, flat-out predicted a redesign to complement the upcoming “Project Natal” motion-sensing camera. I think that’s the most likely scenario of all.

Earlier this year, it was rumored that Microsoft would do this, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer goofed up and said as much. The PR backlash that followed left a lot of mixed messages — designed, I think, to squash the notion that Natal wouldn’t work on existing Xbox 360s — but ultimately a redesign wasn’t left off the table.

It doesn’t make sense for Microsoft to redesign its console in the near future, because it would smack of copying Sony. But it does make sense for Microsoft to reshape the Xbox 360 into something less hulky when Project Natal comes around. After all, the casual, non-gamer demographic is what Microsoft is going for with Project Natal, and a slimmer console would look less intimidating in the average living room.

I’ll admit that my opinion is tinged by the mock-ups that started floating around the Internet (pictured above) long before this story came to light. Sure, it’s totally fake just a rebranded PS2, but it kind of looks like the Wii, and I wouldn’t be surprised if “Wii-esque” is the strategy Microsoft adopts if it does plan an Xbox 360 Slim.

Then again, I don’t own a crystal ball.

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The Press Releases of the Damned!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 18, 2009 at 12:22 am

The Press Releases of the Damned

In the land of the press release, all news isn’t good news–it’s fantastic news. Every product is revolutionary. Each corporate merger is historic. Even layoffs are masterstrokes that will turn around troubled companies. When the stuff announced in press releases hits the real world, the results can be surprising, disappointing, and occasionally catastrophic. Yet the releases remain available in online archives, remorselessly documenting the initial irrational exuberance.

Herewith, seven press releases that turned out to be less than prophetic–all in excerpted form for the sake of brevity, and all annotated with the facts as they actually transpired in the days, weeks, months, and years after the releases hit the wire.

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Windows XP Users Speak Out

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 17, 2009 at 12:43 am

XP SurveyMaybe Windows XP users, on the whole, aren’t hidebound old luddites who stick with an eight-year-old operating system because they fear change. Maybe most of them are smart people who continue to use Windows XP because it does what they need it to do–but who will upgrade to a new version of Windows when they’re impressed by one and are confident it’s ready for prime time.

At least that’s what I’m thinking as I peruse what what nearly 5,000 Windows XP users have to say about their current operating system of choice, why they haven’t moved to Windows Vista, and what they think about Windows 7. They may remain immune to Vista’s, um, charms, but most of them have an open mind about Windows 7–and most of those who have tried 7 really like it.

As part of our research for upcoming coverage of Windows 7. my friends at PC World and I partnered to conduct a survey of Windows XP users. We promoted the survey at PC World, at Technologizer, and via our respective Twitterfeeds, 4994 people took it. We didn’t screen them other than to ask them to confirm that they use Windows XP as their primary operating system. So what they said may or may not reflect the sentiments of the Windows-using world at large–but it’s interesting nonetheless. Here’s a full report.

Continue Reading →

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Rate the State of Microsoft!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 13, 2009 at 4:30 pm

T-PollFor today’s T-Poll I’m going to ask you to play Microsoft pundit. (Don’t worry, it’s easy–or at least it’s easy to be just as accurate as the folks who get paid big bucks to do it.)

The case could be made that Microsoft is on a roll and doing some good stuff these days. Bing has gotten positive reviews and seems to be off to a reasonably strong start in the market. The company finally has the Yahoo deal it’s craved for eons. I haven’t encountered anyone who’s used Windows 7 who doesn’t think it’s a major improvement over Windows Vista. Whether or not the  Zune HD gives the iPod Touch a run for its money, it looks to be an impressive piece of hardware. And most news about the Xbox continues to be upbeat.

But then again, the cash cow that is Windows is showing serious signs of vulnerability for the the first time ever. The company still seems timid when it comes to embracing the idea of Web-based applications (a true Web version of Office won’t debut until 2010, years after Google Docs).  In the iPhone era, Windows Mobile still feels like a Model T that Microsoft is trying to spruce up with better tires and a paint job. Insert your own additional negative thoughts about the Behemoth of Redmond here.

Okay, poll time:

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Still Use Windows XP? Take a Survey!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 13, 2009 at 12:42 pm

Windows XP boxI’m happy to report that I’m working with my pals at PC World on some upcoming coverage of Windows 7. One of the great big questions about Win 7 is, of course, whether it’ll convince Windows XP holdouts who avoided Vista (and who are legion) to upgrade. Only one group knows the answer: Windows XP holdouts! So we’ve put together a survey for people who still use Windows XP as their primary operating system. (Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with Windows 7 yet–we still have some questions for you.)

The survey will take just a few minutes to complete, and will help make our coverage better. XP users, if you can take it (and alert other XP users) we’d really appreciate it–thanks in advance!

Click here to take the survey.

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