Comment 'Breakthrough'? (Score 1) 22
An xbox guy seems like a weird choice if you want 'breakthrough'. There is, absolutely, a lot of engineering that goes into a successful console; but it's heavily skewed toward the value engineering required to deliver consoles at prices below commodity PCs, and ideally console refreshes at lower prices or higher margins than launch consoles; with Microsoft perhaps the most orthodox and least successful at getting novelty to stick of any of the current players.
It's not like the original "we want a console, so we're going to get some aggressive quotes on PC parts and reuse NT and DirectX components" was a stupid plan or anything; worked just fine, minimized risks and wheel-reinventing(though at the cost of being harder to cost reduce); but was an exceptionally orthodox take on the problem.
The 360 was similarly very sensible; Microsoft basically snagged the 'normal' half of the weirder and more ambitious "Cell" processor project for a PPC CPU to pair with a lightly customized ATI GPU design; but, when it came to the only novel part of the setup it seems fair to say that customers were deeply uninterested in how MS thought 'Kinect' should be totally revolutionary; and MS was almost weirdly hostile, until fairly late, to the people who actually were excited about 'Kinect'; and then Apple bought the guys behind that one to go do facial recognition in cellphones. Nice that NT is still capable of moving between architectures; but largely a success in the areas that attempted to be unobtrusive and a failure in the ones where it attempted to be novel; with some, but not enough, deliberate avoidance of novelty.
The Xbox One followed in a somewhat similar vein; even more conservative CPU/GPU choice with a straight AMD x86; everyone was still indifferent or hostile to the kinect, except the enthusiasts of it that MS was indifferent or hostile to; and the HDMI input and 'will totally be the center of your connected living room' thing landed with a thud to the degree it was even clearly articulated and was more or less rapidly forgotten.
I'd absolutely see the value of console-type engineering expertise if you are hoping to do consumer hardware, since it's not going to matter how cool it is if it costs too much; but the history of 'xbox' as a brand and series of products seems like the opposite of 'breakthrough'. Whenever it was focused on doing straight transfer of MS game-related platform to a console context things went just fine; whenever somebody tried something cute or novel things went poorly.
It's not like the original "we want a console, so we're going to get some aggressive quotes on PC parts and reuse NT and DirectX components" was a stupid plan or anything; worked just fine, minimized risks and wheel-reinventing(though at the cost of being harder to cost reduce); but was an exceptionally orthodox take on the problem.
The 360 was similarly very sensible; Microsoft basically snagged the 'normal' half of the weirder and more ambitious "Cell" processor project for a PPC CPU to pair with a lightly customized ATI GPU design; but, when it came to the only novel part of the setup it seems fair to say that customers were deeply uninterested in how MS thought 'Kinect' should be totally revolutionary; and MS was almost weirdly hostile, until fairly late, to the people who actually were excited about 'Kinect'; and then Apple bought the guys behind that one to go do facial recognition in cellphones. Nice that NT is still capable of moving between architectures; but largely a success in the areas that attempted to be unobtrusive and a failure in the ones where it attempted to be novel; with some, but not enough, deliberate avoidance of novelty.
The Xbox One followed in a somewhat similar vein; even more conservative CPU/GPU choice with a straight AMD x86; everyone was still indifferent or hostile to the kinect, except the enthusiasts of it that MS was indifferent or hostile to; and the HDMI input and 'will totally be the center of your connected living room' thing landed with a thud to the degree it was even clearly articulated and was more or less rapidly forgotten.
I'd absolutely see the value of console-type engineering expertise if you are hoping to do consumer hardware, since it's not going to matter how cool it is if it costs too much; but the history of 'xbox' as a brand and series of products seems like the opposite of 'breakthrough'. Whenever it was focused on doing straight transfer of MS game-related platform to a console context things went just fine; whenever somebody tried something cute or novel things went poorly.
