Last year Andrew Kim decided to re-imagine all of Microsoft’s branding as a project for his portfolio. The Next Microsoft went viral, and Kim had his calling card. Today he announced that he’s picked up a job… with Microsoft’s XBox team.
In all the talk of the Facebook phone, a few sites have suggested that a Zuckerberg phone would be as much a folly as the Zune project from Microsoft. Of course the Zune wasn’t a huge seller in the marketplace (but it has many supports, myself included) but I would argue it helped Microsoft in other areas that are just as important:
A long time ago, I sorted myself out with a Zune HD – the final iteration of the Zune Media Players boasted a touch screen, an innovative new interface, a dedicated PC environment for syncing and managing media that wasn’t Windows Media Player, a music store and all you can listen to subscription model that took in the Zune HD player, the PC, and the Xbox home console – looking back Zune brought in a huge amount of knowledge to Microsoft:
Redmond an education that many have missed. Perhaps knowledge is Facebook’s goal, and not sales? More thoughts over on Forbes.
It’s all rumour, conjecture, and fanboy thinking, but there’s a certain logic to Sony and Microsoft pairing up for console gaming. Kotaku brings together some ideas, links and speculates:
You could even look at that as another reason why Microsoft would be willing to cede the Xbox hardware business: Sony’s latest hardware experiments, like their tablets, run Google’s Android. It might be worth a few billion here and there to Microsoft to bring Sony more fully back into the fold. (See also: Nokia.)
This is likely to be #qtwtain ("questions to which the answer is no") but with rising development costs on console games, where the real money is, and the respective strengths of the two companies, there’s a certain logic to this. But then when has logic ever worked with Microsoft’s partners.
(See also: Nokia?)
About 507,000 Xbox 360s shipped last month, making it not only the top selling game console but giving it a wide lead.
For all the taco puns and industry questions, there was a lot to like about Nokia’s N-Gage system, especially in the second "next generation gaming" iteration. It was just a little bit too early to market and never managed to get a foothold in the consciousness of the games in the world. Something like X-Box Live shows just how much of the basic structure Nokia got right – look at the Windows Team Blog talking about the new version of Xbox Live in Windows Phone 7.5 and you’ll see what I mean.
With Nokia set to bring multiple million users to Windows Phone, expect a lot of focus from the gaming sites (as opposed to the regular smartphone review sites) on the mobile version of Xbox Live – and someone in the depths of Finland finally noting down that this was what N-Gage was always going to be about.
I really, truly wish this had been my idea, but still, I’m sure Boris Johnson Facts will make it’s way around the Uk and the rest of the world in the next few hours
Just a few of my favourites, the full list is over at http://www.borisjohnsonfacts.com/
