Microsoft missed the boat by not bolstering Windows cross-platform capabilities
Let’s begin with the most amusing part of the widely derided launch of the Xbox One: At least some of the game demos for the new system were run on a PC using Windows 7 and an Nvidia graphics card. See! Even Microsoft doesn’t use Windows 8 for gaming!
Microsoft used Windows 7-powered PCs to power their Xbox One E3 demos.
It’s not at all unusual for new consoles or games to run on PCs, but if only Microsoft really understood what that meant. At the heart of the new system are eight x86-64 cores, a GPU based on the AMD GCN with 768 cores total, 8GB of DDR3 RAM (3GB for overhead such as OS, and the remaining 5GB for games and operations), a 500GB hard drive, a Blu-ray drive, and integrated Wi-Fi and Kinect.
No PC gamer worth his box would turn up his nose at that kind of firepower for $500. It may not be a pure muscle system, but it’s more power than you usually can get for the price.
It’s even running a kernel with the same network, file, and graphic support used in the Windows family, which raises the possibility of cross-platform portability. The potential for this remains to be seen, particularly since Windows apps can’t be brought straight into XB1 without significant adaptation.
My question is: why?
With Microsoft's foothold in the PC market wobbling, why wasn’t XB1 a radical PC/console hybrid that allowed for full interoperability?
Microsoft could easily have taken that shot, and given Sony a good one-two punch. My question is: Why didn’t they?
~ Thomas McDonald
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