Wall Street Criticizes Microsoft For Natal
![Wall Street Criticizes Microsoft For Natal [Looking Forward to the Project Natal Release Date? Mircosoft Investors Aren't As Motion Control Add-On Comes Under Fire]](http://tftscdn2.nexus404.com/Blog/thumbnailimages/alt/projectnatalTFTSThumb220153.jpg)
We know from comments that quite a few of you are excited for Project Natal, the upcoming NUI (natural user interface) motion control add-on that Microsoft has planned for the Xbox 360. However, Wall Street isn’t excited about it as Microsoft continues facing pressure from investors who think the company should pull an IBM and go to an enterprise-only business model.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek wrote a very damning piece against Microsoft in which they quote several analysts who believe that Microsoft should get out of the consumer technology space. They accuse Microsoft’s whole Entertainment division (Xbox, Zune, Bing, Windows Phone) of dragging the company down and hurting the bottom line and growth of the American tech giant. They seem to be singling out Natal as a perfect example of something Microsoft shouldn’t be involved in.
Microsoft (similar to Google in this regard), makes a large portion of their income from Windows and Microsoft Office, which allows them the freedom to lose income on “side projects” like the Xbox 360, Windows Phone, Bing, etc. etc. Microsoft would tell you that they’re attempting to expand the markets they’re involved in (like Apple, who has successfully pushed out from computers into phones and music players).
Some of the investors quoted by the BusinessWeek article want Microsoft to (as mentioned early) “pull an IBM”. In the early 1990′s, IBM reorganized themselves into an enterprise services and infrastructure company, mostly leaving the consumer space, save for the ThinkPad notebooks (which were generally pushed as enterprise models – and were made by Lenovo all those years anyway).
Do you think Microsoft should give up on the Xbox and Natal? Are you excited for Natal? How much would you pay for the Natal add-on?
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How good or bad natal is won’t affect whether Microsoft succeeds or not in the mobile space.
Microsoft has basically already lost the mobile war. It has made too many strategic errors, and been overtaken by the competition to such an extent that there is now nothing it can do to catch up.
Windows Phone 7 is being rushed to market with such haste that it will be full of bugs, shortcomings and missing features. Nobody is going to want it.
Microsoft’s Kin phone has already failed after only a few weeks on the market. It is simply not selling. We’re going to see the same situation when Windows Phone 7 is released. Handsets will be released in early 2011, and the WP7 platform will get axed mid-2011.
If I were a Microsoft shareholder (which I’m not) I could certainly understand (and probably agree with) those calls for them to get out of the consumer business and focus more on the enterprise side.
But as a gamer, I certainly DO want them there – without them there would be a severe lack of competition.
No its Sony that needs to leave consumer electronics. Its not actual investors that believe this about MS only bought and paid for shills from firms like Sony.
Obviously those investors are retarded. Microsoft may very well be on the cusp of taking a major step into the direction they’ve been going for since the inception of the Xbox… dominance of the living room. If Microsoft can move themselves into a position of dominance in the entertainment industry as a whole the amount of money they could pull in would be phenomenal. Microsoft is eventually going to have to change up their business side of the house completely and they’ll need another money maker to fall back on when this happens. When the day comes that you turn on your Xbox with your TV so you can enjoy your entertainment in whatever form it may be that is the day that Microsoft has succeeded and it’s the direction that they’ve been heading to this whole time.
Forget Wall Street. I hope Microsoft blows all the skeptics out of the water with Natal, and I hope it revolutionizes video gaming like they say.
While I’m excited about Natal, our Xbox 360 and the Xboxes of most everyone we know has failed at one time or another; requiring sending them to Microsoft for repairs. Granted, the repairs were free, due mostly to the fact these failures plague a good many of these units.
While Xbox 360 leaves a bad taste in our collective mouth, we do love the games and must admit Xbox Live is the best networked gaming system on the planet. So, despite the hardware, Microsoft managed to crank out an engaging system. How well Natal fits into the Xbox ecosystem is anyone’s guess.
To put it into perspective, there’s a free PC app named CamSpace which lets you control computer games with almost any handheld object. While this is possible, is it necessary? I’m sure Natal (or whatever it will be called once released later this fall) will generate excitement – but can it maintain it enough to keep people coming back for more? Can it compete with the Wii interaction or even Sony’s almost-controller-free controller? Hard to say. I can guarantee a lot of families would quickly snap up the next big thing from Nintendo though – their hardware, their games, their quality and simplicity are almost Apple-like.
They should give up on xbox? Why? I mean the thing is making profit so why get rid of it what nonsense! If anything they should stop there mobile phones and that zune thing.
I bet it’s the same “analysts” who never saw this crash coming, and now they are predicting about future. You’ve gotta be brain dead to listen them on anything.
Pretty short-sighted of investors to dis the Natal device… this sort of technology might well change the way PCs and TVs – and other devices – are used. There’s a lot of potential for being able to manipulate software – and therefore “hardware” without touching it.
i mean granted microsoft has made a few failures, but to pull out of the consumer market is to eventually lose the home market and academic market, which probably is why microsoft is preferred in the enterprise market. so … to pull out of the consumer market is a pretty darn stupid suggestion. Plus, i mean WP7 is still sometime away, and if you look at what they did for the kin phone, which was a small 1 hour press release, i think they never expected it to succeed, but merely a test some new concepts. all in all, a lot still is up in the air, just like how fast android took over (2 years? max?) microsoft can make a come back.
@shan
Very good point. Android came out of nowhere and is a serious iPhone competitor (despite what some Apple fanboys say). In two years, it could be a three-horse race with Windows Phone in the mix.
That advice from wall St. is so illustrative of why the United States is SO far behind many other countries where r&d, new ideas, development are more then encouraged.
To advocate more centralization and less competition is an insidious way of allowing mini monopolies in different spaces not to mention dulling the ambition to move forward. Hell, we’ve all seen innovations in Japan’s mobile devices 10 years ago that have finally come to the US.
It’s so typical of wall St. to act ONLY in it’s only ultra greedy interest. screw them.
GO NATAL
Microsoft pull out? got to be kidding me.
Microsoft & Nintendo are actually the only two companies who market shares has expanded considerably this gen, Sorry sony but your market share has taken a huge hit comapred to last gen.
Microsoft is loosing its monopoloy in the OS, they are still #1 but every year what goes by they have more and more competition, apple, google, (linux is still hanging around). So they will need to expand in other areas to compensate, console gaming, phone market, Search engine
It’s like Natal it is proof that were following the idea shown in sci fi films, We are moving to a motion free, 3d/tablet world (good example is minority report, avatar etc)
With microsoft being #1 to the motion free side they will be able to have an edge in the future, just like how apple is now looking to take ipad tablet control and with the 3ds coming out we can expect next gen for 3d tablets.
If microsoft did a IBM, they will not have a great future they canot realie on there #1 earner windows when they can take a share in other areas.
natal is gonna be a huge failure. Keep the xbox 360 and video games but expand the computer market.
You can’t push technology if you don’t have side projects. Microsoft has always pushed technology. A lot of what is perceived as new from the Apple crowds has been around for years, and Microsoft has always been in the R&D of those technologies. Microsoft is one of those few companies that I can rely on to produce and support a product that is well made, has a defined life cycle, is supportable, can be integrated seamlessly and is priced well. Wall street is not the technology sector, they are the money sector. Wall street does not know what they are talking about. Looking forward to Natal. it’s on my christmas list along with a couple of Dell Lightning Windows Phone 7s.
The hack and burn is the strategy Wall Street thrives on. I know the MSFT stock has not gone up, for about a decade, but the best and brightest of america who gave us the financial mess and socialized their losses on the backs of tax-payers are telling Microsoft how to conduct itself? For them creating wealth is high frequency trading and moving the server closer to the Stock Exchange. Brilliant people devoid of moral compass is the sure way to go to hell in a hand-basket