by Rhian Hibner
Daily Lobo
The war of the consoles, so clear and easily defined in the fall of 2006, has become murky and unpredictable over the course of the winter. The Nintendo Wii is still flying off the shelves at a predictable rate, but surprisingly, the sales of the PlayStation 3 have begun to reach sustainable levels. Meanwhile, no one can really decide if Microsoft is showing its genius or proving its fallibility with the Xbox 360 Elite. The PC side of things is just as obscure. Windows Vista is starting to trickle out to the masses, but the graphics-card manufacturers are not prepared.
Since the PS3 launched, sales have been less than what Sony might have been hoping for. While the Wii was flying off the shelves, the PS3s were collecting dust on the shelves in stockrooms across America. That problem seems to be going away. The question is, why? Is it because Sony decided to enable some of the video-scaling technology that it had previously left inaccessible? Perhaps it was the ease with which one can swap out the hard drive on the PS3. While those things help, the simplest explanation is often the truth: Decent games are starting to be released.
Of course, the situation is never so simple. Microsoft appears to have made a blunder in releasing the Xbox 360 Elite at so close a price point to the PS3. The real question is: What does that $480 actually buy? The answer is: not a lot. Sure, one gets a pretty, black 360, rather than a plain-old-white one, and it even comes with a matching controller. It comes with a 120-gigabyte hard drive, but compared to the ability of the PS3 to accept virtually any size hard drive, it's not that impressive. Last of all, the ability to output HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) is nice, but of importance to only the owners of high-end televisions. The worst mistake of all is reducing the psychological distance between buying a $600 PS3 and a $480 Xbox 360. Now, a consumer can look at an Xbox 360 Elite, compare the features, and come to the conclusion that for an extra $120 more, one can get almost the exact same machine, with the additional ability to play Blu-ray movies.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
As far as video games go, Microsoft is having a bad time all around. It can, at least, blame its problems in the PC realm on the two major manufacturers of video cards. The problem all circles around DirectX 10, the latest version of the programming interface used to make games for Windows Vista and the Xbox 360. The new standard requires the use of a new video card designed to take advantage of DirectX 10. Nvidia has the hardware available in the form of its GeForce 8800 series but has yet to produce a decent software driver. ATI has the opposite problem. The Catalyst driver suite is surprisingly robust given its rocky history, but no DirectX 10-capable video card is available from ATI yet. As a consequence, adoption of Windows Vista is not yet happening at the rate Microsoft would like.
Both of these factors put Microsoft in a potentially dangerous situation. With the PS3 finally starting to sell in significant numbers, Microsoft appears to have given up its key advantage. Meanwhile, with its main cash cow being adopted slowly, the admittedly massive cash reserves that Microsoft possesses will begin to disappear. These are the same cash reserves that are already hemorrhaging cash at a rapid rate, having dropped from $64 billion to $29 billion over the last three years.
Microsoft needs to be very, very careful if it expects to beat Sony in this round.
