Bill Gates made his first appearance at the Electronic Entertainment Expo or E3 touting why his product is better than Sony's PlayStation 3. Sounds like the Xbox 360 will be ubiquitous in nature according to the New York Times:
With Microsoft's Live Anywhere system, game developers will be able to incorporate features that allow users to send instant messages between devices, and see if their friends are listening to music on their mobile phone or working on a PC. On certain games, players will be able to begin play on the Xbox 360, then switch to a mobile phone; they could also challenge others remotely regardless of whether they were using a PC or an Xbox 360.Next the Times has an article about the big face off coming between Microsoft and Google:
Microsoft, of course, is the reigning powerhouse of computing and Google is the muscular Internet challenger. On each side, the battalions are arrayed: executives, engineers, marketers, lawyers and lobbyists. The spending and competition are escalating daily. For each, it seems, the other passes what Andrew S. Grove, a founder and former chairman of Intel, calls the "silver bullet test" of strategic competition. "If you had one bullet, who would you shoot with it?"Writer Steve Lohr goes on to examine past business rivalries from Sears and Montgomery Ward's to Ford and GM to to see why the winner came out on top:How the Microsoft-Google confrontation plays out could shape the future of competition in computing and how people use information technology.
The auto industry presents a sobering history of past-success syndrome. The Model T, introduced by Henry Ford in 1908, famously made the automobile affordable, helped along by his pioneering assembly-line production, which started in 1913. Ford's laserlike focus on efficiency drove the cost of a Model T from $850 when it was introduced down to $275 by the early 1920's.But then GM didn't take the Japanese too seriously... CONTACT: Leave me a Houston or Texas media news tip | COMMENT: Click to leave your thoughts on this post here
But cost and efficiency was all he focused on. The design was not updated, the color selection remained black and only black. Eventually, the single-mindedness caught up with the company. In 1925, the Ford share of the American market had fallen to 45 percent, from 57 percent two years earlier. By then, Alfred P. Sloan Jr., the managerial maestro of Detroit, was president of General Motors and its sales were surging.
