Out Of The Xbox

(6 of 8)
You can watch DVDs on it. If you have a digital camera, you can plug it into the Xbox 360 and pop the images up on your TV, which beats making everybody crowd around the computer monitor in your study. If you have sufficient techno-gumption, you can even connect the Xbox 360 to your PC wirelessly, via wi-fi, and access whatever music and pictures you have stored there.

That's not all. The Xbox 360 has ambitions as a communications device. Unlike either Sony or Nintendo, Microsoft has a fully fledged online service, called Xbox Live, to go with its game console, and with the launch of the new Xbox, Gates & Co. is hoping to turn it into a major online community with Friendster-like features that match up compatible gamers. Companies will use Live to distribute game trailers and sell mini-games and new game levels. It will be a free-for-all bazaar. Players will be able to customize games—say, the way the skateboards might look in Tony Hawk's American Wasteland—and then sell their custom wares to one another online.

Right now you can use Xbox Live to talk to people you're playing with via voice chat—think free long distance over the Internet. Soon you will also be able to send e-mail and instant messages. If you have a camera peripheral, you will be able to send short video messages and even videoconference. And here's an important point: with Xbox 360, you don't even have to be playing a game. You will be able to chat with other people over Xbox Live when you're just plain watching TV.

The words appear over the show, or you can chat aloud using a headset. That is, arguably, much more useful than actually playing games. Gates is so stoked about it, he can't believe other companies haven't done it before him. "If there's anything we're confused about, about what Sony's thinking, it's when do they get their act together on the equivalent of Live?" THE NEW ECOSYSTEM
Let's not miss what's happening here. Microsoft, a company known primarily for making highly profitable business software, has put a box in your living room. It entered your house under the humble pretense of being a game machine, a toy for the kids, but it just ate your CD player and your DVD player, and it's looking hungrily at your telephone. It's all up in your media cabinet. It's talking to your iPod, your digital camera, your TV, your stereo, your PC, your credit card and the Internet. It has created a miniature electronic ecosystem inside your home, with itself at the center.

Games are just the condiment. This is the main course, and it's what Gates is really after. Games just get you in the door. "You can't just sell it as a convergence device," Gates says. "You gotta get in there because certain members of the family [I.e., teenage boys] think it's a must-have type thing. But the way to cement it is as a family experience. And the way that it really makes sense for Microsoft, and we justify this sort of circuitous route that we went down, is because of how it fits in the living room."

1. Sarah Palin's Breakout Night
2. Searching for Palin's 'Hot Photos'
3. The Man Behind Palin's Speech
4. Why Disasters Are Getting Worse
5. Mayor Palin: A Rough Record
6. Can Palin Escape the Parent Trap?
7. Call Of the Wild
8. In Wasilla, Pregnancy Was No Secret
9. Understanding John McCain
10. McCain's Prickly TIME Interview