For a while Microsoft was the King of PC stuff. How come they didn't just cozy up to the PC but had to do the XBOX and pretty much lose their ass with all the cash grabs?

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Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Patnou@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

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Paragone@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The other answers here are important.

But there’s an angle that people apparently aren’t noticing?

The urge to make the brand cover more & more & more…

Outside of a Keiretsu ( a Japanese business-structure where a brand/name like Panasonic has 30…300 companies in it, where each company is essentially an “organ” within the organism…

Toyota is a vertical keiretsu, Panasonic & Sony are horizontal keiretsu.

Horizontal keiretsu get into everything.

Want solar-cells? Panasonic makes ‘em.

Want electronic-components? Panasonic.

ttbomk, they make mining-trucks & industrial-robots.

EVERYthing.

They are a semi-autonomous economy, & that is the actual intent.

Complete supply-chain. )

outside of a keiretsu, nearly every time any company tries to spread the brand onto other products/services, it dilutes or obliterates the brand.

It’s an apparently-irresistable urge, though…

Coca-Cola is focused, but Pepsi owns Frito-Lay, restaurant-chains, pop, etc…

So, ,Coca-Cola can go to restaurants & say “Pepsico is competing against you … do you want to be buying anything from them??” & that’ll work to turn the restaurant to Coca-Cola.

The book “Focus” by Al Ries is on this stuff.

GM had a bunch of brands, such that each brand “Pontiac”, “Buick”, whatever, had its own specific niche in the market…

Then they obliterated that…

A Cadillac-loyal guy showed me a Cadillac brochure he got sent: it told him to by a Chevrolet e-vehicle.

Brand-violation.

Cadillac lost immense credibility in doing that ad-campaign.

Anyways, it’s a fundamental market-fact that you have to have each brand be in-focus, & Reis’ book “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” is on how the market is going to deal-with you.

Remember Borland? ( you probably don’t )

They made software-compilers for Windows, last century…

Microsoft was squeezing them out of existence…

They tried rebranding, as “Inprise” … & lost marketshare faster than they ever had, before…

They changed their name back to Borland… & died more slowly.

The market decides what your brand means.

IF you decide on “brand extention” THEN you have communicated to the market that you don’t matter anymore, because you have no focus

AND…

The urge to do a “brand extension” is sooo fundamental, that it’s apparently irresistable for corporate-executives??

I’d outright fire anybody who tried brand-extension, in any company I was running: READ the books by Al Ries ( & Jack Trout, & Laura Ries ), & UNDERSTAND & LIVE-BY those meanings.

Company-survival isn’t mere-pretend!

Amazon did it successfully, because it had no competitor ( changing from books-only to everything ).

But … nearly nobody survives such idiocy.

Microsoft … there’s a book “A New Brand World”, don’t remember the author … it recounts a PR company who’d been hired by Microsoft … the Microsoft culture was destroying them. That contract was their most-lucrative-contract, by far.

The CEO of that company, one day, sent around to all-hands an email which stated only:

“Ding dong. The wicked witch is dead.”

EVERYbody knew that it meant he’d killed the contract, in order to save their company’s soul.

Toxic-culture isn’t just male-culture in many places, or some family-cultures, it can be corporate-culture, too, right?

Steve Ballmer is part of Microsoft history, of the period you’re identifying…

He was much of the problem, from what I can see… bullying was his … thing, from the things that Microsoft got famous-for, in TheInquirer.net , & TheRegister.com back in those days…

Most of that journalism is wiped from the internet, nowadays…

Charlie Demerjian also did much on them, through the years… ( www.SemiAccurate.com is his current site, iirc )

Ego, especially unconscious ego, is the most-lethal “strategy” one can obey.

Brand-extention is an ego-masturbation.

Every specific domain ought have its-own brand!

Unless one is a keiretsu.

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JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

and pretty much lose their ass with all the cash grabs?

In 2017 Microsoft’s gaming division had about 9 billion dollars of revenue.

In the last fiscal year (ended in July) that revenue was 23 billion dollars.
Sony: 31 billion dollars
Nintendo: 9 billion dollars? (harder to find numbers)

Microsoft still has 95% of the market share for PC operating systems for gaming: …steampowered.com/…/Steam-Hardware-Software-Surve…

I think they’re doing okay. Just because they’re not number 1 in consoles doesn’t mean they’re dead. 30 million units sold of Series X/S isn’t exactly losing their ass. And all console fans should cheer for MS to keep going. It’s great that Steam Deck and the like are pushing into the market now, but losing Xbox would be terrible. Price, innovation, and quality would suffer if Sony didn’t have MS nipping at their heels.

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- Zoot@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  If you’re not first you’re last, atleast that’s what my daddy used to say ~Michael Scott
  
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nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
The answer to the question comes from understanding the marketplace.

Microsoft’s vision in the '90s was a computer on every desk and in every home.

In the late '90s and early 2000s, devices like TiVo came on the scene and disrupted the living room. Microsoft started experimenting with Media Center which was a PC that would sit between your cable box and your TV.

Also remember that Microsoft has been in gaming forever. You certainly heard of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Microsoft’s acquisition of various game studios in the '90s cemented their presence in the space.

Anyways, at the time it was theorized that some company would eventually control media flowing into the household through the TV screen and Microsoft absolutely wanted that.

The media center only found limited success, and was kind of a kludgy solution. The first versions of Xbox attempted to overcome some of this by having some media capabilities. The peak of that effort was the first version of Xbox One which actually had an HDMI input and the ability to control your cable box. Had that reached widespread use, Microsoft would have had lots of data about what TV channels everybody was watching and who was watching (remember the first version of Xbox One rolled out with a camera that could recognize who’s watching) and for how long.

Unfortunately for them, that tech was too little too late and streaming services like Netflix were already catching on. Now you can see in later versions of Xbox Microsoft has pulled back and developed game pass which is a steam-like subscription service, and hasn’t really tried to be a TV media player to the same degree anymore.

When a company gets huge, like Microsoft, they can’t really waste time chasing business efforts that might only have revenue potential in the low billions. It just doesn’t move the needle. The problem is that innovating brand new ideas that will eventually become multi-billion dollar businesses is phenomenally challenging. And people who can do that don’t work for companies like Microsoft.

So the entrepreneurs who can potentially dream up multibillion dollar disruptive business ideas go do them on their own and then companies like Microsoft snap them up as soon as they’re able to (if the founders allow it), allowing dominant players to remain dominant without needing to innovate.

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Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Why sell lots of one thing when you can sell lots of two things?

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HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Microsoft did cozy up to the PC; it just happened to create a console that acted like a PC to hedge its bets and create a new product line.

The initial development of XBox came from Microsoft’s development of DirectX, which led to Microsoft doing a lot of the heavy development lifting required to make a console. At that point, all Microsoft needed was some hardware and it could ship product. So, Microsoft shipped XBox figuring that PC/XBox compatibility would beneficial for developers.

At that time, it was unclear if consoles or PC’s would win some forms of gaming. By making the XBox, a developer could develop for both, therefore defending PC gaming with Windows as an option.

Microsoft also made a lot of money off the consoles, since development costs were lower due to having to update DirectX for Windows as well.

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jjjalljs@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I just assume big businesses are run by idiots.

If Microsoft had their shit together, they could’ve made something like Steam. That’s just printing money.

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- fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
They’re still the undisputed market leader on the PC and their console seems to be doing quite well, too.

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yesman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
The big tech boys are all founded on explosive wealth created by innovative technology. And they’re all obsessed with recreating that. Capitalism demands constant growth.

So they’re always in rabid competition to grow and expand while also looking for a new market to exploit.

It’s also why Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet have all been the biggest suckers for AI hype. It would be funny if they hadn’t pushed the entire US economy closer to the precipice.

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foggy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
This is a very complicated question. Many Microsoft employees would have a very heated debate over the answer to this question. It was the cause of a ton of internal conflict. Many Windows developers saw the Xbox ecosystem as a cannibalization of their existing product.

The move was political. Microsoft wanted to get some of that PlayStation money. They were afraid of losing the living room to Sony. Sony had TVs, VCRs, DVD players, and now this other thing, PlayStation, that also plugged into the TV, that all the kids were essentially demanding have equal place among the DVD player.

Microsoft already had PCs in homes. Well, operating systems. And many developers would have agreed it makes more sense to blow open the emerging market they were already champions of/adjacent to.

But it paid off. They were able to secure a fight over the living room rather than allow a competitor to take it on wholly. Pivoting to PC gaming would t have solved this threat.

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- cannon_annon88@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I loved my Zune. I think I was the only one that had one.
  
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  - foggy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Yeah the product was fine, it just didn’t do well. The windows phones, however… 😬
    
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- andrewta@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Foggy made it quite clear
  
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dan1101@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
They tried to lock people into the Xbox ecosystem instead of being open like Steam Deck.

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count_dongulus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
line go up

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Alexstarfire@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Greed. Can’t be content with what you got. Always need more.

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wesker@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
They diversified, and I don’t know if I would say they lost their ass at all. Substance, maybe.

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ApatheticCactus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Microsoft’s strategy has never really been to compete on quality, it has always been to be the only game in town. Microsoft loves to buy out the competition and kill it so they’re the only real game in town and then passively milk it forever as a captured market. Zune never really took off because microsoft didn’t actually care about music players, they just didn’t want the iPod to be the defacto option. Microsoft didn’t make Bing to be the best search engine, they just didn’t want google to be the default. They don’t really care about making edge the best browser, they just want chrome to not be the default. The list goes on.

When Sony made the PS2, some countries had import laws where a game console as a luxury item would be prohibitively expensive, but computers were not. So Sony made a PS2 linux version so it could “Technically it’s a computer, not a game console” to sidestep the law. Didn’t really work, and they dropped it pretty hard. They didn’t really want to be a computer. They tried again with the PS3, but they didn’t really care about making a linux console, so it had basically zero support.

Now Microsoft saw Sony making a game console, but it could sorta be a computer. They were scared that Sony may make office applications as “games” and threaten the PC market. Microsoft couldn’t just buy out Sony to make them stop, so they decided to enter the market with a far superior machine that was priced super cheap for what it was to try to bully Sony out of business. It was never really about the games, it was about trying to bully potential competition. It didn’t matter they didn’t make money, it was a bill to pay to block competitors.

They’re just competing to make sure that future PlayStation systems don’t just add PC features until people wonder if they should even buy a computer and a PlayStation if the console does everything they’d need a computer for. Also people tend to favor the xbox name and branding over windows, so they have incentive to keep the brand alive even though they really do not care at all about gaming.

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neidu3@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Can’t remember the name, but there was a Finn in charge if Nokia who ended up running that into the ground through a series of bad decisions to the point where MS could buy Nokia for cheap. And he ended up in a leading position (might even be that he was CEO, I don’t remember) around the time when MS really accelerated their enshitification focus.

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- Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  They only purchased the Nokia division that made phones. Nokia is still very well alive and doing great in tons of different markets, including lumber (*)
  
  (*) at least was a few years ago last time I cared to check.
  
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  - neidu3@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    My winter set of studded 235/55R19XL are Nokia
    
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- Patnou@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Mind if I start using enshitification? Best word i heard all year
  
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  - neidu3@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I didn’t coin it and its use is fairly widespread, so go ahead.
    
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palordrolap@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Xbox was an indication of what Microsoft have always really wanted to do, what Apple have always done, and what Microsoft have tried to do with the Win 11 roll out:

A narrowing of the technical specification and focus in order to minimise support and required testing. That costs money.

Cost bad. CEO mad.

Each Xbox release has been a release of a bunch of clones. Yes, they are based on PC hardware, but it's one set of identical hardware to support across tens of thousands of instances, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of actual PCs, barely any two alike.

Then note that many people don't want to use a computer at home. Computers remind them of work. They want to play games and goof off in their spare time. A games console is ideal.

And if that console happens to be based on PC hardware, the games can eventually be ported to the myriad actual PC options. But they can get the game out and running quickly on that one well-supported platform and cash in quick.

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zxqwas@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Because when you make the console you get to charge anyone who wants to publish a game for it anything you like. Microsoft made money on every pc sold with windows, but not every game sold for PC.

Same reason EA, UBIsoft and every other big publisher tried to launch their own Steam competitor. To ideally make money from someone else selling their game on their shop, but worst case just to be able to make negotiate a better deal from Valve.

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Fyrnyx@kbin.melroy.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
They did the XBox because they simply just wanted to. I don't really understand the second half of your question and would prefer it if you expanded on that.

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fletcher_bosom@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
In the beginning, there was Atari. Home gaming consoles were small money compared to office productivity software. Then came Nintendo, who demonstrated that gaming consoles could be a billion dollar revenue stream, at the time that Office was saturated and stagnating. MS felt they had the capability to enter and compete in that market and really they didn’t do too badly.

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