Open Infrastructure 360!!

[catterwall]

anyone else heard much about this? it means that just about anyone will be able to make a 360. you know if this happens there will be a Funai 360 somewhere down the line. is this a good move on their part? or do you think its the worst mistake ever?

[plee]

Originally Posted by catterwall

anyone else heard much about this? it means that just about anyone will be able to make a 360. you know if this happens there will be a Funai 360 somewhere down the line. is this a good move on their part? or do you think its the worst mistake ever?

doubt it will happen, why would another company make a 360? Not sure if M$ is still losing money on the hardware but a company can just buy the PC parts and you got a more powerful machine?!?

[alansaysstop]

Would Bill Gates even allow that?

[JohnGalt]

Originally Posted by alansaysstop

Would Bill Gates even allow that?

Yes, absolutely! We're stuck with M$ today because IBM did precisely this with their early IBM-PC while Apple chose a closed and heavily royalty-levied format for Mac hardware. As a direct result of those choices the PC is ubiquitous while the Mac (sorry Mac fans) has never risen beyond niche product status. M$ is a software company, they'd con others into building their hardware if they could but that's precisely the question: will anyone want to take on this task for them?

[Urian]

Originally Posted by JohnGalt

Yes, absolutely! We're stuck with M$ today because IBM did precisely this with their early IBM-PC while Apple chose a closed and heavily royalty-levied format for Mac hardware. As a direct result of those choices the PC is ubiquitous while the Mac (sorry Mac fans) has never risen beyond niche product status. M$ is a software company, they'd con others into building their hardware if they could but that's precisely the question: will anyone want to take on this task for them?

Not exactly.

IBM never wanted to make the PC an open platform but it was the reverse engineering of the BIOS who made that another companies starte to make PCs. Perhaps my memory fails to me but IBM wanted to close the PC with PS/2 architecture and the reaction of the industry was the EISA bus. The reason why Mac failed was the software, All the IBM PC are compatible with former OSes and software, the first Macintosh wasn´t backwards compatible with Apple II software.

Now about 360 and the possible license... are they talking about 3DO again? putting more companies in the equation won´t make the 360 more sold and more popular. Do you remember 3DO, it will be the same then.

[catterwall]

i don't see how it would really be feasible. theres already no margin in the 360 and then they're going to license it out to other companies. M$ will retain the cheapest console while toshiba and anyone else silly enough to attempt this will have to charge an extraordinant amount of money. all you get is an expensive pile of crap. it pretty much turns into a HD-DVD player that can also play 360 games.