Xbox and Zune And Windows Mobile, Oh My!*
Speaking of the Xbox LIVE Marketplace, check out the excellent three-part interview Dean Takahashi (formerly technology editor at the San Jose Mercury and now at VentureBeat) recently conducted with Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s VP of the company’s Entertainment and Devices group (which spans a diverse array of products, such as game consoles, portable multimedia players, mobile phones, and various services for them).
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Bach, I think you’ll concur with me that his responses to Takahashi’s queries are generally direct and thought-provoking. For example, I found it interesting that Bach admitted the portable music business was already quite mature and that there therefore was little profit to be made in the players themselves…while at the same time pointing to services wrapped around the hardware as the next lucrative battleground. And on that note, I’d also like to commend Takahashi on his as-usual pull-no-punches questions.
As I read through the Xbox 360 material in particular, my thoughts wandered to the subject of a related recent online content flurry; an analyst’s contention that Microsoft was ‘penny wise and pound foolish’ in attempting to design its own GPU for the console. The theory is particularly interesting in light of Steve Jobs’ recent admission that (as I suspected from the beginning) the company fundamentally acquired PA Semi in order to assemble IC design engineering teams for use in future iPhone- and iPod-targeted chip designs. As I wrote in late April:
I’m not surprised that Apple’s ‘cutting out the middle man’ and bringing IC design in-house. Microsoft made the same move in the Xbox-to-Xbox 360 generation transition, and it has both cost and control benefits in high-volume situations (but then again, Apple’s also incurring incremental forecast risk).
Will Apple succeed where Microsoft (purportedly) failed? Fortunately, this won’t be the first time that the folks at 1 Infinite Loop have taken a stab at semiconductor design…the company has a long history, for example, of crafting the core logic chipsets that surrounded IBM- and Motorola-sourced 68K and PowerPC CPUs.
*Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Microsoft…
