The Future
At this point, fewer than 2 million Surface tablets have been sold. Windows Phone has a 3.2 percent share of the smartphone market. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, has sold 77 million units and has been the bestselling game console in the US for 28 straight months. Not to take anything away from Microsoft’s other consumer products, but there’s no longer any question which side the company’s bread is buttered on. And if the Interactive Entertainment Business division gets this right, the Xbox One is going to be a very, very big piece of bread.
We have no idea what the videogame landscape will look like seven years from now, just as we had no idea in 2005 how foundationally streaming and smartphones would change everything. The very concept of any physical media box may well be obsolete within a decade. But even if this is the last true console we ever see, one thing is for sure: Gaming isn’t just games anymore. And the Xbox One intends to keep it that way.
The real question, though, is what that means for Microsoft’s future plans. Apple’s a hardware company, and Google’s a software company, but they both offer an integrated experience that takes place within their walls (whether or not you look at those walls #throughglass or not). Microsoft makes both hardware and software—and does it well—but the company also knows that it doesn’t have the install base to lock down the experience. And more important, it’s lacking connective tissue. If its investment in Azure lets the cloud become that tissue, then the Xbox One could be the hub of the integrated experience Microsoft sorely needs.
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not sure if anyone read/posted the Wired column on it, but here:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/xbox-one/