Tech industry

Microsoft goes All-In with Xbox Series X?

Microsoft and Sony have turned around their first cards in the next-gen console race, revealing the main technical specs for their next-generation consoles.

While Sony is the market leader in the current-gen with the PS4 and enters the race from a strong position, the question is, how far is Microsoft willing to go to reclaim ground.

It is worth looking back to better understand how we ended up here. Sony dominated the first two generations with the PS1 and the PS2. The first Xbox wasn’t a serious competitor but helped Microsoft to learn. With the PS3 Sony made an expensive mistake by going too far while Microsoft gained a lot of ground with the Xbox 360. With the launch of the 4th generation, it was Microsoft who made a big mistake in the beginning by launching the console together with Kinect. Microsoft wasn’t competitive in terms of pricing and Sony nailed it with the $399 launch price! In combination with the strong lineup of exclusive games, Microsoft had no chance to catch up with Sony in the current generation.

Coming now to the 5th generation. Microsoft made a lot of changes. The man in charge of the Xbox division, Phil Spencer has the gaming DNA. Under his reign MS has acquired several game studios to secure more exclusives, he is pushing new services like Game Pass, xCloud or Xbox All Access. Tech spec-wise the new Xbox Series X is more powerful than the PS5 and that nearly across all aspects incl. CPU speed, GPU teraflops, memory bandwidth or storage size. To be clear, raw hardware power itself doesn’t result in better games.

The question that is left, is the launch price for the Xbox Series X and the PS5. And here is where it gets interesting. My impression is that Microsoft is willing to use its balance sheet (cash!) to fight and take an aggressive stance on pricing. They spend money on M&A, I guess they subsidize services like Game Pass Ultimate, and they did not go cheap on the new Xbox. I wouldn’t be surprised if the price gap between the PS5 and Xbox Series X is much smaller than many expect or that there is no difference at all (maybe cross-subsidizing through bundling with a subscription service).

The launch price will be key to bring Microsoft in a position from which it has a fair chance to effectively compete.

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Google Photos

Google Photos is an amazing product. After Search, Gmail,(Google Drive; there is legitimate competition from Dropbox & MS) and Youtube, Google Photos is the next billion-user product for Google.

The USP and differentiator is the object & facial recognition technology. It’s scary how good it is already. Facial recognition is amazing and it not only works with photos but also with videos. It’s super convenient to search for “Jasper” “Snow” and within milliseconds I see the photos of my son from the winter holiday. Or jump back in time to a specific location, super easy with Google Photos. No manual tagging needed, no elaborated folder structure required.

Collecting vast amounts of data and organizing it is Google’s mission. I believe I read somewhere that per day 1.2 billion photos are uploaded. The computing and storage requirements must be gigantic. For $10 you get 2TB of storage now with the upgrade Google One Plans. That is a hell lot of space to store all your photos for the foreseeable future photos, and all of them will and need to be processed.

So far all my smartphone photos from the last 4-5 years are in Google Photos. It’s enticing to upload all digital photos that I have. There is a good amount of photos from my DSLR and the photos from the early years with a digital compact camera. They lack the geolocation data, unfortunately.

Another nice feature of Google Photos is the feature to share the entire library or parts of it automatically with a partner. That comes in pretty handy for families. The integration feature with Google Drive in both direction is another useful feature of Google Photos.

A question for sure is the price that we as users pay. Don’t be evil isn’t easy when the currency is user data and Google is getting a vast amount of private data from each users who uploads his photo library.

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How to Miss the Boat – Five Times
Despite Microsoft’s remarkable financial performance, as Microsoft CEO Ballmer failed to understand and execute on the five most important technology trends of the 21st century: in search – losing to Google; in smartphones – losing to Apple; in mobile operating systems – losing to Google/Apple; in media – losing to Apple/Netflix; and in the cloud – losing to Amazon. Microsoft left the 20th century owning over 95% of the operating systems that ran on computers (almost all on desktops). Fifteen years and 2 billion smartphones shipped in the 21st century and Microsoft’s mobile OS share is 1%. These misses weren’t in some tangential markets – missing search, mobile and the cloud were directly where Microsoft users were heading. Yet a very smart CEO missed all of these. Why?

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