I have an Xbox1 on pre-order, but I'm starting to think paying $500 for the privilege of being a beta tester may not be the smartest thing I can do with my money (getting a PS4 as well when some of the Sony exclusives hit, likely when The Order drops). I still like a lot of the ideas behind the Xbox1, but its starting to sound like every division in Microsoft saw the Xbox Live and 360 installed user based and decided they wanted their piece of that sweet, sweet incremental services revenue.
- Hey you guys have voice chat right, lets use Skype instead
- Well we've built out Azure for cloud services, lets integrate that for...stuff
- Entertainment division - Well we're already selling movies like iTunes, what if we could integrate with the TV services they are already hooked up to, then we could integrate web ad tracking with tv ad tracking
- Why build a dedicated OS when we already have Metro for Windows 8?
- What if we could use Kinect to sell conference call services to businesses?
- etc...
I'm half surprised that we haven't heard that they are adding keyboard and mouse support so that they can sell Office 365 subscriptions for people's Xbox's, they seem to be just about the only division that isn't a stakeholder in this thing.
The idea behind a lot of this stuff is cool, but they seem to have lost the plot that at the end of the day this is supposed to be a games console, and if you're going to do all this incremental stuff you don't let it out of the oven until you have both the core function and user experience nailed. It's something that Apple inherently gets (at least for the last 10 years or so with a few notable exceptions...cough...Maps...cough...MobileMe), but Microsoft doesn't, and is why the 360 experience was their one consumer hardware success story over the last several years.
I'm reserving judgement until the console actually releases but right now the result is looking a lot closer to "The Homer" (when Homer tried to design a car for "the everyman") then the iPhone.