You may have misssed it, but the RRoD is covered by an extended warranty. I'd have much prefered if my box hadn't RRoD'ed but getting it repaired for free from MS was painless. The only reason I would consider buying another 360 isn't because I needed to replace a broken one, but because the 250 gig drive in the Modern Warfare package is a hell of a lot more appealing than the gimpy 20 gig drive I have now (granted if they went the Sony route of user replaceable that would be a non-issue - what the hell is wrong with the world when sony is actually *not* the propriatary one).

"What MS needs to provide is a rich set of Graphics APIs and a modern UI framework, it is time to say goodbye to old Win32"

You know, you provide a whole lot of fancy terminology to give the appearance that you know what you are talking about, mentioning ATL, MFC, Cocoa, etc, but in the end you honestly don't, achieving nothing more than name dropping. The one thing WMo actually has going for it is the .Net Compact framework which is probably the most developer friendly embedded API set and development environment. Someone who spends a good deal of time with the full framework will certainly appreciate what is missing from the Compact Framework, and there is quite a bit of noticable gaps there, but it is miles away from the likes of ATL, and has been since 2003. So congratulations, you are only about 6 years out of date in your criticism, which in the world of development technologies is the equivelent of living in the cambrian.

Incidentally, all of the spiffy visual effects, utterly trivial with managed DirectX in the .Net CF. That most developers don't use them has almost nothing to do with the availability or ease of use. If you want to bag on Windows Mobile there are a wealth of very legitimate criticism (the fact that everything but the development environment is stuck in the Pocket PC days for example) but development frameworks is not one of them.

I wasn't horribly impressed with it when it was mouse only, but the multi-touch gestures seem to add a lot. With multi-touch laptop monitors looking like a trends post-7 launch it might be worth another shot if I update to one of them.

"when 1.3 billion phones a year are all smart, the software that's gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that's given away for free by somebody who doesn't make their own phone"

That isn't at all true - the software with the lowest total cost to put on a phone while providing the greatest incentive to the customers to purchase the product will be the most popular. Or, to put it another way, the software that will lead to greatest profitability of the product will be the most popular, and that is not at all the same as saying the software that is free.

It has admittedly been a while since I worked in the embedded space with OEMs, and it was not in the phone market, but it was with embedded software for the likes of Samsung and LG. Software is not their strong suite - they are hardware OEMS. Free software is meaningless to them if it costs them a great deal of money to get on their device. If they can pay a bit to get more approachable software and a good relationship with a company familiar with the software they will, because in the end it will save them money. That is why companies PAY for Windriver linux for embedded devices instead of just grabbing the kernel for free and customizing it themselves.

Likewise free software means nothing if it won't move devices. OEMs could have been dropping linux on phones for years, could even work with Windriver and similar Distro providers to save software costs, but in the smartphone market it was not until Android was available that linux saw any movement onto smartphones (there are feature phones that use it, because the OS is much less a selling point on them - cost and gimmicks sell feature phones) because linux by itself would not move units. Android actually had some hype behind it, some consumer interests, so it made sense. Incidentally, while Android the distro is free I can pretty much guaranty that every OEM is paying google for help (and google isn't sinking money into android just to sell GMail on the phone - they want to make money off the OS as well).

In the end OEMs are going to consider the market attraction of the OS and the actual cost to get the OS on the phone - they will calculate total profits over projected sales as a result and it is a hell of a lot better to move 2 million phones even if they pay $5 per phone for OS/support to get the phone up and running than it is to move 500,000 phones even if the OS/support only costs them $2 per unit to get it running (and even with free OS it will cost them per unit to get the distro running on the phone).

Incidentally, source code "freedom" need not apply - WM ships with sourcecode to OEMs just as Android does. Hence how HTC has managed to make a fairly integrated and less crappy shell for the fugly OS.

WebOS is a Palm only OS so no different really than RIM or Apple. Microsoft's main competitors are symbian and android, and symbian is increasingly a Nokia only OS (completely buying symbian did a lot to drive away other OEMs). The WM stategy has sucked in the past, mostly because Peter Knook, the former head of WM, was a bloody idiot who thought everything would work out if he only focused on business integration (and truthfully the business integration points on WM are very mature and far ahead of the competition - its just everything else that sucks about the phone). It also didn't help that much of the WM management was former WIn 9x management, but if you want to see where the layoffs hit hardess it was the management structure of WM. MS has always been full of marketing rhetoric (that is, after all, a companies mission - inflate your own product, deflate competition, who cares about realities) but the seem to at least internally be honest about how shitty things have executed to this point.

That said, given how antiquated WM seems today it is actually somewhat a testement that they haven't hemoraged anywhere near as much as they deserve. HTC, while playing around with Android is still a thoroughly WM shop (their product pipeline does have more android phones than any other OEM, but it doesn't compare to their output of WM phones), Samsung is plugging away at competent WM phones, LG is dedicating their upper end smartphones entirely to WM (Samsung and LG are big wins for MS, as the korean manufacturers have a pretty sizable impact on the phone market), and even some of the niche players remain very WM centric (toshiba and HP for example). Honestly it is surprising that the only real losses MS has suffered were Motorola (who is teatering towards deathbed status) and Sony Erikkson (similarly not healthy) - one has completely given up on WM and the other pretty much scrapped the majority of their plans and only pays lip service to supporting the product.

That isn't to say that MS isn't in seriously trouble if they can't turn things around, but the picture is rather less bleak than they argueably deserve at this point.

The monk was never a Blizzard class. It was added in the expansion that Blizzard's sister studio Sierra published. Technically Blizzard was truthful. Also, that expansion sucked.

"Voltition goes from Saint's Row to the radical Red Faction: Guerrilla? Who saw that coming?). "

Saint's Row was a blemish in an otherwise great run. A better line would be "Volition goes from Freespace and Red Faction to Saint's Row? Who saw that coming". The original Red Faction was an underrated but highly enjoyable shooter, and the Freespace series is one of the best space sims availalbe, the match of anything short of Tie Fighter. The aborration is that they went from that to laboring in relative obscurity on the Saint's Row series, which, while not bad, are defined by their inability to stand out in general.

Anyway, it isn't so much the design chops of the blizzard folks that defined them, but their obsession in making something so polished and approachable. If that attitude carries over to the new organization developing the Marvel MMO it has a serious chance, but if the new dev house isn't willing to commit to that the addition of blizzard talent matters fairly little.

They have said that it will follow the same model as the live arcade games - download as many times as you please. They pretty much need to since even the 120 GB HDD is a little small for this to be used extensively (seriously MS - 320 GB hdd are below $100. How about a capacity bump).

"It is puzzling to me that I can't use a Microsoft product with Media Center or Media Player."

How do you think the DoJ, or more relevant to current events, the EU's equivalent, would react to MS bundling an application to utilize their PMP built into the OS, that works with their music store, while not supporting the primary market competitor? If Zune ever did supplant a significant portion of market share while MS was doing that, what do you think Apple's accusations are going to be if that were the case? They already were eaten alive by the EU just for including WMP in Windows.

Personally I think MS should completely remove the WMP shell (the COM components need to stay, as many app devs have coded against them) and offer a single media player as an optional download in their live apps package.

" sony can do the same type of stuff with the PSeye, albeit with slightly less accuracy "

Not really. Natal (which is a dumb name) utilizes two optical sensors placed apart to achieve stereoscopic vision - that achieves depth perception. With a single sensor (or single cluster of sensors) the image being processed lacks depth information, though some tricks can be done to try and guesstimate. MS has further expanded on the idea by making the sensors sensitive to different wavelengths, to provide further visual differentiation. It's a clever implementation. Sony is using the want to try and work around that limitation, by providing a second data collector. Largely I suspect this is because the algorithm for motion capture with distinct tracking points (the end of the wand for example) is mature and didn't require a lot of software innovations that need to be perfected and also because it is easier to interpret motion data from the wand and visual data from the camera, than visual data from two separate cameras. MS has the advantage here of having a multi-billion dollar research arm to leverage, relationships with a variety of academic research institutions, and the cash to snap up interesting companies. Sony has to go a less resource intensive route given their financials (MS may not be happy about not having revenue growth, but at least they made billions last quarter rather than losing money).