well… that was nice mental excercise. Not to mentio the fact that we thow out some 25 hundred words about something that is just a pranl. That should give us some idea about state of blogosphere in this april.

All efforts in the direction to nail into what once was Sony’s market have failed: the Xbox (billions of losses, close to 50% of actual shipment going to inventory), Zune (irrelevant with not even a 3% registered sales last quarter), the Media Center (born obsolete, billions of losses, HP abandoning it altogether), the PocketPC environment (no attempt at a mobile UI, nuked by Symbian, soon again toasted to extinction by OSX on mobile).

Microsoft is not going to dominate the living room, not this company. The culture, the care, the make-sense attitude (that Apple is heralding profitably this decade) is just not there. You may wonder why Jobs seems uninterested to the Virtual Worlds scene. To understand why, look what else they are doing now and the sheer targets involved.

If Apple sees profitability, Pixar’s Renderman will provide the engine, NetObjects the protocols, Quartz the client, Disney the shadow. But my feelings suggest they don’t see cash. For now.

Your optimism for a company headed towards a serious downsize in influence (on developers) and ambitions is, in my opinion, wrong.

Traditionally Microsoft has been quite good at buying out companies, competitors especially, not at engineering products. It is possible that this type of buyout is precisely Rosedale’s exit strategy but to say so today is premature. Phil won’t give up his 5M-going-to-10M users easily.

Microsoft is not going to beat Sony on Sony’s best, the micromanagement within a closed environment of their huge content catalog, which is coming to play in Home. Microsoft’s ability at managing and creating content is debatable to non-existent and what we see materialized another huge writeup under the chapter LOSSES.

If they have to then they’ll buy.

Who’ll buy an iPhone in June? Now you sound like John Dvorak. John knows he’s wrong. Ask him

And, of course, SL could be easily ported to the Xbox and even the PS3 — and who knows, perhaps the Wii!

no, you can’t. You maybe can enter the second life by Xbox or PS3 but freedom of generating content is not there.

They are pretty much confident that Microsoft Metaverse will become what they wished to attempt with MSN back in 1995: a closed-content environment, fully dominated by Microsoft, only open to their own (licensed) users, and with a huge content production industry targeted for Microsoft’s platform — all their partners.

Yes, as always, Micro$oft is disgusting in their wishes for happy future. But it won’t gonna work. It wasn’t possible in 1995, it is even less possible now. Can you imagine internet closed in one huge (but still one) BBS owned by just one company? No you couldn’t imagine that ten years ago, nor you can now in the age of Web2.0. Trying to put a claw over the whole metaverse is a suicide act. Is Micro$oft brave and crazy enough to try to get its power back by neglecting that there are Mac and Linux users in the world? I doubt.