[Console Edition] Satya Nadella: "We are going to make some difficult decisions"

How oddly true I didn't recognize this until now. Very little mention of Microsoft on the device itself. XBOX is very much a brand on its own. How is XBOX as a brand useful to MS is your question: hmm. Seems like with XBO they wanted to move into content management or something but even though the original idea failed they can pivot Xbox One and still meet their intended goals. What that goal is, is beyond me.

 

If the sales figures are to be believed, digital sales from the online stores on home consoles still pale in comparison to physical sales so you may be over-crediting the digital stores significance in making money and selling hardware.

Why? It's awful. And I speak as somebody who choses to compute on OS X but somewhat feel locked into iOS because of past significant purchases. iOS serves me well but the App Store is not a good experience as a user.

 

No, my question was "But how do you monetise branding exactly?". Business is about contributions to bottom lines.

 

They sell more than games.

I don't think that the Xbox Digital Marketplace sells hardware to any great extent, though, which is why I said "reciprocal to varying degrees". I think that the Xbox leadership team that planned and executed the launch of the XBOne thought it did, though. In this case the reality seems to be that the relationship is very much one-sided. That's why killing the Xbox would kill that revenue stream right along with it. As for how significant the revenue is, it was significant enough to get a mention in every earnings release for several quarters running.

 

Because of that.

 

T-shirts!

 

So I read most of the thread. What are these decisions? Did I miss this bit?

 

Yes. Microsoft are deciding whether to change the canteen's Hotdog Monday to Hamburger Monday.

 

That's not a difficult decision, hamburger is real meat, while american hotdogs are made of carcass slimy paste with starch, salt and MSG.

Vote Burger !!!

 

Bratwurst spaghetti sauce is also yummy with the right type of wurst!

Saw that article that gaf posted about MS courting AMD, maybe the difficult decision was to not buy them. We have heard some of the internal MS chip designs for servers is pretty interesting, so I wonder if AMD was ever looked at or just wishful thinking from that source article.

 

Looking from the outside in , it makes little sense . Sure they can buy AMD and prevent Sony from going to them next gen and saving a little money on chips for the xbox one but currently AMD has nothing that can match cherry trail and the core line for the surface or anything for windows phone and certainly not hololens .

So the only way it would make sense if AMD has something cooking that is amazing or at least comparable to what intel has cooking. So it would have to be zen based in which zen could form the ground work for a new xbox , surface line and maybe phone line ? Or perhaps their arm chip is really good and MS would gain something there for windows phone ?

 

Apparently MS sold Bing Maps to Uber and the MS engineers who worked on Bing Maps are moving to Uber.

 

Similar deal with their advertising division. That's (largely) been sold to AOL.

 

If MS buys AMD, they would need to contend with Intel about the x86 license. AMD's x86 license is supposedly not transferable to any other company. And even if MS could acquire the x86 license, do they want to compete with their #1 hardware partner Intel? Plus AMD has been the target of buyouts from various companies in the last month, from Samsung to Qualcomm to being broken up.

 

yea but intel needs the x86-64 liscense so I don't think it would change much.

Also would MS need intel as a partner if they have amd ? Of course that's if they have something that can compete

 

The worlds biggest software company who happen to have a monopoly in desktop operating systems owning a microprocessor and GPU company would open all sorts of anti-trust issues. This would be very bad for Nvidia and potentially even Intel.

Not going to happen. The EU definitely would not approve this and I doubt China or the FTC would either.

 

If Intel takes away x86 license from AMD, AMD could take away AMD64 license. And nobody would produce modern x86 CPUs anymore!

ARM should buy AMD and end x86.

 

Isn't Apple the worlds largest Software company now ? They also have their own chip business for their phones.

MS isn't dominate anymore and AMD is far from being dominate.

 

Allegedly MS has $95 billion dollars in cash/whatever. AMD's cap is like, $2 billion.

I honestly dont know why they wouldn't do it. It's just a pittance. If nothing else, it's probably a cheap way to significantly harm the other console competitors, who would now be forced to deal with the prickly and likely expensive likes of Intel and Nvidia for future consoles. Microsoft paid 2.5 billion for basically, freakin Minecraft. I'd wager AMD is worth at least that to their plans in all areas.

You also would save at least whatever AMD's profit is on every Xbox One sold, which might be a significant number. You'd also have inside complete access to the latest tech AMD has cooking when you're building your next console. On top of that as a side benefit you could gloat over Sony paying you for every PS4 they sell.

I find it really odd that AMD hadn't been bought yet as it is, by Samsung, Qualcomm, even Sony, or whoever. Their value seems MUCH higher than that 2 bil number to me in patents alone.

 

eh like I said , its only worth MS's time if amd has something good coming up. Their cpu designs are poor currently, so I wouldn't see them going with those over intel. Their apu's are to power hungry and low performance to replace intel in hololens and surface. they wont work in phones either.

So really what do they get ? Patents and a discount on the xbox line