Kevin Wood-419472 (5/29/2013)
I also have made my career with Microsoft tools and they've done a lot right over the years. Yes, they've stumbled but they've always seemed to pick up the ball again. I've never been one to listen to the haters but since Bill has left it does feel like the company arrogance is on the upswing. The powers that be at Microsoft appear to be riding their own hobby horse, marketing features that are useless to common folk while ignoring features that would make a lot of user's lives much easier (CREATE OR REPLACE, anyone?).Microsoft doesn't seem to want to listen any more. They didn't listen to customers with regard to Windows 8 and it's flopping. They didn't listen to customers with Windows Phone it's not doing well in the market. The Visual Studio 2012 UI looks like monochrome capitalized CRAP. Developers hate it and I refuse to upgrade to it. The new XBox One isn't backward compatible with all of the XBox games people already have. Yawn! One of the Connect issues can no longer be voted on after no response from MS for 8 years!!! I won't hold my breath on these issue and I see very little reason to upgrade to any of this.
I don't know enough to chime in on a lot of your points. In regards to XBox One, I sincerly hope it flops and flops hard and fast.
Today I have three XBox 360's in my home. When I want to play a game I play on mine. That means if my son wants to play a game of mine, he can grab it and play it in another room. We are a family, we should be able to purchase a game disk and play it on any machine we own. The idea that I will have to pay the same outrageous price for a game and buy it three times so my kids can play it means I won't be giving Microsoft any more money.
As a counter point, when I purchase a game add-on I can download it on another machine and play it there as long as my account exists, but I have to be logged on for anyone else to play. This prevents me from downloading it everywhere, and still means I might need to buy a COD expansion map twice, but I think that is OK if I expect my son to play the same new maps as I am on another machine. I bought two copies of COD:BO2 so we could do just that, so buying a second map pack is well within what I expect to have to do. We own three copies of Minecraft so we can play it on any machine, but it was $20!
I will NOT purchase XBox One if I have to shell out $180 for every game I buy so I can play it on whatever machine I want that I own in the home I own.
Dave