09.27.10
Posted in Hardware, Marketing, Microsoft at 5:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The real story about “Halo: Reach”
Summary: Microsoft stops concentrating on Xbox 360 (and to some extent KINect, which is behind) and instead it is trying to sell a game
LAST week we wrote about fake Halo hype. A lot of money got spent on a lot on marketing, so the hype machine was busy and it was used to affect the stock as well.
“‘Halo: Reach’ doesn’t deserve all the praise,” says the headline from TampaBay.com and GamaSutra.com publishes “Analysis: Is Microsoft Putting Halo At Risk?”
“All that Microsoft can do is spew a lot of other news to overshadow what it does not want people to see and talk about it.”There are more reports this week about ‘disc read’ errors [1, 2, 3]. “HD constraint affects Microsoft Halo series” says another new headline. All that Microsoft can do is spew a lot of other news to overshadow what it does not want people to see and talk about it.
The negativity got sidelined to a certain extent by the marketing blitz, most of which was about future release frequency [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Can Microsoft really use another studio to reinvent itself? It would not be so profitable and commitment to PC gaming is still doubted by some.
In the article “Bungie’s Halo slips”, the author is again slipping in/dropping unbacked figures from Microsoft (rave numbers like the ones we saw years ago, calculated using fuzzy maths):
SOME OF the $200+ million worth of Halo: Reach discs sold don’t blooming work, meaning that rather than be able to play as Noble 6, users have to suffer the ignominy of trawling through forums for help.
[...]
We’ve asked Microsoft in the UK whether this is a disc problem or a hardware problem, and requested information about what frustrated users should do if they don’t want to call a US phone number.
We are still waiting for a response from Microsoft.
When it comes to the Xbox franchise, there is no indication that they will even stay in the market (no plan for future hardware, just procrastination from Microsoft’s UK boss).
EA says that Sony’s Playstation 3 can beat Xbox 360 even in the UK where the Japanese consoles are relatively weak in terms of sales [1, 2].
“It is clear that in terms of sales Nintendo is the winner and on technical grounds, Sony is ahead.”Rather than brag about international sales figures, Microsoft talks mostly about the US and right now it speaks of individual games rather than console sales (which it only speaks about in context/relation to this game). It is clear that in terms of sales Nintendo is the winner and on technical grounds, Sony is ahead. To quote one new article, “Sony’s Playstation Move does beat rival Microsoft’s Kinect to the table by a good two months—ignoring, of course, that both have been trumped by Nintendo’s Wii since the console’s birth in late 2006 (and the launch of its Wii MotionPlus controller add-on in June of 2009, which builds an additional gyroscope onto the console’s motion controllers).”
The “Move” receives overwhelmingly good reviews (whereas KINect is said to be unready for production due to bugs and Milo is said to be dead already). From NYDailyNews.com: “Hence the PlayStation Move, Sony’s foray into motion controls, arrived with much ballyhoo last week, and after spending plenty of time with the gizmo, I’m definitely impressed. It’s not the sheer leap forward that Microsoft is attempting with the no-hands Kinect that will be released later this month, but the Move is definitely the pinnacle of motion-sensing technology.”
When all that Microsoft can speak about (and spend a lot of money marketing) is one single game, no wonder Sony ridicules them (for the huge spendings on marketing). It’s hard to tell just how much money Microsoft has lost on Xbox already; just being in the market is not enough for making money (as in a profit) and loads of Xbox executives have been leaving lately. It speaks volumes, unlike all the hype. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A sample of new ‘donations’ from Microsoft and an exposé from the British press about what happens to money Bono is given for charity
LATER on in the week we are going to deal with the Gates Foundation separately. Today, we shall start by focusing on the man who was famously shown on the cover of Time along with Bill and Melinda. The British press is currently exposing his charity as somewhat of a farce. He got caught in a ‘charity’ scandal and current news headlines include:
1. BONO CHARITY SPENDS MORE ON WAGES THAN GOOD CAUSES
2. BONO’S ONE CAMPAIGN GETS £10M DONATIONS BUT GIVES JUST £118K
Another charity effort gone awry? Well, in Gates’ case it is even more complex because a lot gets spent on publicity (i.e. controlling stories in the press to eliminate or wash aside legitimate criticism). But there are many other factors. Either way, the party best known for fake donations would be Microsoft in our case. Later on we are going to write again about Bong [sic] bribes, which the company labels “charity”. Looking at last week’s news we find several more examples of this kind.
“Microsoft donates to Tutorial Center” says this one headline, but it’s utter nonsense. They are ‘donating’ copies of something which costs nothing to reproduce. Worse — they are donating Office lock-in. “The software, valued at $57,000, are for TTC’s Microsoft Office Suite applications and Windows 7 for both Macintosh and PC computers,” says the article. This is no donation, it’s just PR. Microsoft has already explained its views on counterfeiting.
“They are ‘donating’ copies of something which costs nothing to reproduce.”For PR value that’s akin to what’s gained from American EDGI [1, 2, 3, 4], Microsoft is now exploiting the situation in Britain [1,
2] and it is pushing its lock-in into more academic environments, brainwashing young people inside the school system, at taxpayers’ expense.
As one last example of fake donations from Microsoft, consider the Russia NGOs spin [1, 2]. This Microsoft PR success story is still in the news [1, 2] as they don’t tell the original story anymore. Rather than report about Microsoft cracking down on political opposition the story told is one about Microsoft ‘donation’.
It often seems like donation is ~90% about publicity and a lot less about practical gain to society. These proportions may vary depending on individual cases and generalisations help not at all. In Microsoft’s case, the so-called ‘donations’ do great long-term harm. They may injure more than they actually help. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 3:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s efforts to control the Web are falling flat on their face; we judge this also based on the past week’s news
Silverlight has become either a niche or a dead product by now [1, 2, 3]. Success stories or major new clients have been hard to come by for well over a year; it’s almost unheard of. In one whole week, the only headline with “Silverlight” in it was a press release and it was mentioned briefly in another (no headline match). That’s the symptom of a product that does not matter anymore. When all that a product can do for publicity is get this kind of puff piece, i.e. a sort of advertisement for BizSpark (not news), then it is practically part of the past. We saw that with Surface for example. There are many other examples though. A few days ago we noticed that the Microsoft press (Redmond) had begun advertising BizTalk, courtesy of Kurt Mackie [1, 2, 3]. This publication long ago quit pretending that the press is independently reporting on Microsoft, so does that count at all?
Another product we have been tracking is hosting (in its different forms) from Microsoft, which has suffered many downtimes recently [1, 2]. That too is somewhat of a niche, at least for the time being. “Azure” for example was mentioned just once too (in a whole week’s stock of headlines). This one too seems to have become somewhat of a niche product. GNU/Linux-based equivalents are well ahead in that regard and Microsoft can only try to trash-talk or attempt to extract a patent tax from those.
In all the above examples we continue to see attempts by Microsoft to gain power on the Web. All these attempts are failing. In a later post we are going to give some numbers. For the time being, the take-home message is that Microsoft still fails on the Internet. It had high ambitions some years ago. █
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