Windows sucks. I like XP well enough but XP is what Windows 98 should have been. Having no competition allowed Windows to make very little in the way of changes from 1995 to 2001.

It's different when M$ does it. I bet Bill didn't even break a sweat when he made these decisions. Moves like this would have broken Nintendo and even mighty Sony would have had a tough time pulling this off.

I don't think Sony has plans on that.

Say it three times and click your heels together.

Why? Because of your personal feelings against Microsoft? These are all Giant Corporations who exist to make money. If you think one is any more "evil" than the other, that's absurd.

Microsoft may just have more money, and that allows them to last longer during the initial release period problems. You may not like their other products, but then no one forces you to buy them.

Come on, he obviously made some good decisions to get that rich. Just because he is successful, we should all hate him? Seriously, did he steal your lunch money or something? And, I think that your phrase "it's different when M$ does it" counts as bashing Microsoft.

LOL. Funniest thing I've read all day.

I thought in Japan on PS2 you were going to be able to rent movies over the internet like Pay Per View.

Watching this thread degenerate into Microsoft/Windows bashing instead of talking about XBox 2 has been really fun.

Please continue if only for my amusement of its overall absurdity.

I haven't done that, but you're right, a lot of people in this thread have. I still don't understand why people think it's so fun to bash a successful company.

Because there success has stymied the growth and innovation of the whole PC industry. If they didn't have such a huge monopoly I'm sure there would be operating systems that worked better than windows (well techncially there is in Mac OS X), better word processing programs, better internet browsers etc.

They've killed the competition which is bad for consumers, as competition is what forces companies to come up with better products.

I think many people are afraid MS will do the same thing to the video game industry. Remember when Atari had a monopoly and games started sucking and they nearly killed the whole video game industry, and would have in Nintendo hadn't came along and revived.

Personally I think this concern is misplaced. People should be much more worried about Sony getting a mononpoly on the video game industry considering the huge lead they have in world wide sells.

A monopoly is bad news for gamers. It makes no difference which company has it.

Hopefully MS and Nintendo will continue to do well enough to stick around and keep up enough competition to keep sony working and keep the quality of games at a high level.

I agree completely.

What I think everyone is missing here is that it will be a LOT harder for any company to maintain a monopoly in the videogaming industry compared to what MS has in the PC world.

Unlike MS' Windows OS, there is NO silver bullet, indispensible product that will allow one company to have continuous sway over the consumers.

When people buy consoles, most don't expect or care about having backwards compatibility. There are no files from your old PC that need to be read. No complicated interfaces that need to be relearned if you decide to go with a different company. All you do is buy a new machine and pop in some new games. Everyone offers a similar experience. And brand loyalty is weak in the face of relentless flashy advertising and good games.

So while there is always going to be a leader in each generation and that leader will always engage in strong arming tactics if they can get away with it, any well-funded, determined competitor has quite a good chance of coming in and taking over if they are lucky and persistent enough. As long as games bring in the money and there are cash-rich tech-savvy companies out looking to make a buck, I don't think you have to worry about lack of competition in this arena.

Your argument just gets worse and worse. I wonder how much $ony spent on advertising when introducing the PSone. If you take that and extrapulate the numbers to what the gaming market was worth then compared to the $30B now. I bet what $ony spent closely resembles the $1B Msoft spent for the XBOX.

As hard as it is to believe, I couldn't agree with you more Josh. Competition is good for consumers and if Microsoft wasn't here providing competition for Sony, the quality of games and consoles would suffer. I think PS2 is the perfect example. At the time it was released, Sony basically had a commanding lead and ended up releasing a poor product. PS2 failed to live up to it's billing and as it has been widely reported, is extremely difficult to program for. Now that there is competition, anybody want to bet if Sony's next console will be much more powerful and developer friendly?

What?

Like he said, most people don't care about backwards compatibility on consoles. Its a new feature and an added plus, but it's not expected. So it's less incentive for consumers to buy the same brand console in the next generation. Not to mention that many people just keep their old systems.

On PCs, they've always been backwards compatible, with games and software, so that enabled MS to get their monopoly as people wanted to keep buying OSs that would run all their old software.

He was using this as a reason that it will be harder for any one company to get a monopoly in the console industry.

Well, I wouldn't call it a new feature. I just looked through several old Atari videos and I know they were touting the ability of the newer Atari console to play Atari 2600 titles, and the Commodore 128 emulated the Commodore 64 hardware pretty well. But still, backwards compatibility seems to have fallen out of favor long enough that it seems new.