A deck of slides has emerged purporting to show the strategy of the Xbox platform until 2015 (Update: It has since been taken down). The slides are very dense (someone hasn't learned the 10-20-30 rule) and packed full of information such as augmented reality glasses, cloud gaming, Kinect 2 and 720p requirements.
My impression of it is that it continues with an ur-strategy theme of games, music, movies and so on all under one box. Certainly this has already been the direction of the Xbox for some time as it has attempted to fit ever more content into its dashboard and made moves into every space it can find. However it has come with some cost. The current device feels undirected, and often the options within the dashboard have very thin content.
However the ambition is appealing, a sort of game console-meets-iPad idea. Clearly Microsoft wants the Xbox to be a universal device - and they are one of the few companies that could conceivably do it - but the question is whether they will continue to try and marry that ambition to their publishing-heavy approach to content. The iPad strategy works because it is curation- rather than publisher-driven, so each user's dashboard of apps is essentially their own. Microsoft, so far, have been trying to manage that for users directly, and the result feels like a graveyard.
So will the strategy attempt to fix that? It's hard to tell, but my sense is that the console that does learn that lesson is the one that will win the next generation fight.
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