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May 21, 2005
E3 and Me
Thanks to the generosity of my friend Dan Kit, last Wednesday I got out of the library and bussed up with his company and some other friends to E3 in Los Angeles. In case you don't know, E3 is the yearly video game expo that debuts the latest and greatest the industry has to offer. In a word: impressive.
The Los Angeles Convention Center was absolutely packed with wait times to see some game premiers 2 hours plus. Keep in mind that passes to the event are tough to come by and this isn't an event for teenagers with their parents in tow: no one under 18 is allowed through the doors. Believe me, walking into the event you begin to understand the reason that video game sales currently exceed the movie industry's annual box office draw.
Apart from the unveiling of Darkwatch, a couple highlights were the 360 degree screen in the EA games exhibit featuring the Xbox 360, the premier for the Playstation 3, and Nintendo was also there with news of their next generation system. It's unbelievable what these new systems are capable of producing, not only in terms of graphics, but also as a media hub for your living room.
On that note, the same day we were running around the Convention Center floor taking in all we could, Holman Jenkins published an appropriately titled article "What the Fuss Is All About". I found out last Wednesday. Give his piece a read to find out for yourself:
...investors were wondering if Microsoft would ever have a second act after its desktop dominance. The drunk-on-hype rollout of its new game machine, Xbox 360, which continues this week on the cover of Time magazine, is Bill Gates's attempt to answer with a resounding "you betcha."
Let's hope his timing is right, because Microsoft is promoting an ambitious reordering of the tech landscape around the idea of "convergence." If you're a cable TV provider, look out. If you're Intel, get ready to become a smaller fish in a bigger pond. If you thought the latest, fastest and best always ends up in a business desktop, think again. All that was familiar, at least since the PC became techdom's central object in the mid-1980s, is being torn asunder.
To get the machine it wanted, Microsoft has put itself in direct competition with former best friends, computer makers like Dell and HP. To get the chip it wanted, it dumped a long-time ally, Intel, and signed up IBM -- which also makes chips for Apple as well as forthcoming game machines from Sony and Nintendo.
Even so, Microsoft, which once left hardware to others, is taking proprietary ownership of the Xbox "chipsets," signaling an interesting reintegration of software, semiconductors and end-user gadgetry.
Then there's Xbox Live. Some call the new game machine Microsoft's Trojan horse in the living room, but the sneak attack may really come from the broadband network that Microsoft has created to support online gaming and much more.
Even users of the free version will be entitled to chat and trade text messages with fellow subscribers. With a reported 1.8 million subscribers, Xbox live is already effectively the largest provider of voice-over-Internet connections, posing a direct threat to current and would-be phone operators. And voice is just the beginning. Xbox 360 will also have a large hard drive -- large enough to hold plenty of music and video files. That means -- you guessed it -- Microsoft is positioning itself to be a supplier of video on demand in competition with cable operators, who live in dread of being relegated to a "dumb pipe."
Posted by Peter Mork at May 21, 2005 6:38 PM
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