Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Technology

Professor cyborg
If we want to stop machines from taking over, we better start becoming more like them.
By Janelle Brown
[10/20/99]

Attack on the Net
In the midst of dot-com mania, one radio ad campaign takes the offensive against online commerce.
By Andrew Leonard
[10/19/99]

Technology: View from the top
Stoking the Net's growth
Industry veteran Ellen Hancock talks about Windows NT, glass ceilings -- and how her company, Exodus, keeps its vast server farms humming.
By Julie Polito
[10/18/99]

The Hollywoodization of venture capital
The business of funding tech companies has gone gaga for brand names and boffo deals. "Visionaries," though, may be out of luck.
By Mark Gimein
[10/15/99]

Books
The Red Hat diaries
Are Linux coders and Linux companies on different paths? A slapdash new book and a recent flurry of corporate maneuvers suggest just that.
By Andrew Leonard
[10/14/99]

Complete archives for Technology

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

One thing it's thinking is, "Windows everywhere" -- a Microsoft slogan. The company wants Windows running not only on personal computers, but on palmtops, cable-system set-top boxes -- and game consoles, too. It wants to own the very concept of the operating system. One motivation must surely be to get Windows into the console market, even if that means Microsoft has to go it alone.

But perhaps a stronger motivation is fear of Sony. Playstation 2 will play DVDs and audio CDs. Shortly after its release, Sony will produce an ethernet-plus-hard-drive add-on that will enable Playstation 2 to connect to a cable modem. It's announced that Playstation 2 will be a "platform for Internet-based electronic distribution of digital content in 2001" -- beginning with downloading games via broadband, but ultimately including video on demand and God knows what all.

The suits are dreaming of convergence. Sony wants Playstation 2 to be more than a game machine; it wants it to be the center of your electronic life, your cable set-top box, your video and audio player, your Web browser, your e-commerce machine. The dreams may be based more on corporate arrogance and lip service to the mantra of "convergence" than on any hard analysis, but Microsoft takes it seriously. It views Playstation 2 as a threat -- not to Microsoft's own game business, which is tiny, but to Microsoft's ambitions, because Microsoft wants to be the center of your electronic life.

Why should anyone draw a moral distinction between the two? From a developer's standpoint, there's a vast one. Sony, like all the console manufacturers, keeps developers on a very short leash. If you want to develop for a console, you sign agreements with the console manufacturer that tie you up six ways to Sunday. The manufacturer has ultimate approval over the game; if it doesn't like it, it never appears. If it wants changes, you make them, or else. The manufacturer decides what its marketing budget will be. You must manufacture and distribute through the manufacturer, and it takes a cut. You must buy your development hardware and software from the manufacturer; you must pay it royalties. It's got you by the balls.

By comparison, PC development is liberty hall. True, Microsoft won't give you access to the source code for Windows, but Microsoft won't try to stop you from developing for Windows, either. You can do what you want. You can publish what you want. You can buy hardware and code and development tools from whoever you want. The same will presumably be true of X-Box.

Sony makes Microsoft look like the free software operating system Linux -- as a result, many developers are unquestionably rooting quietly for X-Box.

Ultimately, the market will decide. But here's the score so far.

Dreamcast has taken a beachhead, and is advancing on all fronts. It has a year of easy victories before the competition attacks -- but Sega's enemies have impressive ammunition. Dreamcast has a shot, but the real hostilities have hardly started.

Playstation 2 boasts the most impressive armament in this war -- lightning-fast, Playstation-compatible, the ability to play DVDs. It has one problem -- its price, higher than any of its competitors -- but Sony still commands the big battalions. It's hard to imagine Playstation 2 failing.

Dolphin has one advantage: Nintendo is watching the coming skirmish between Sega and Sony carefully, and will avoid their mistakes. It has one big problem, too; its assault will begin late, the last of the three (or four) big marketing attacks. Indeed, few in the industry believe Nintendo's launch date of winter 2000; most expect Dolpin to appear later. By that time, it may just be too late.

X-Box? High in the fastness of their Pacific Northwest redoubt, the secretive forces of Chairman Bill prepare to open their own front in the war. Their intentions are unknown; indeed, their secretiveness means that, like the Soviets faced with an American lunar landing, they can plausibly deny they ever intended to compete if they wish. But X-Box, if implemented right -- able to play existing PC games, with power comparable to Playstation 2, with developer support, with a marketing campaign that (unlike Microsoft's normal P.R.) appeals to the intended market -- has an outside chance of conquering the world.

The armies are massing and the first shots have been fired. The war has begun.
salon.com | Oct. 21, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon