Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans
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"Let" is that the wrong word. Microsoft was setup specifically to make BASIC for the Altair. DOS they stumbled into because CP/M dropped the ball. Every other product, they've been chasing new markets that they didn't think of being in.
I'm critical about Xbox handheld/portable because it was so obvious that that's where the demand would come from.
However, they've been better at monetizing their other software and services better than anyone else though.
wrote last edited by [email protected]My point here is that none of these cases feature Microsoft inventing a brand new product and trying to market it for the first time. Their whole strategy from the very beginning was to look for existing products with existing markets and try to conquer them. They even had a name for a variant of this strategy (targeted at open standards) which the US DoJ famously discovered during the antitrust trial:
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To be fair, every company was sure handhelds would die and mobile games would take over everything. Then the Switch happened.
Anyone that has ever played a game on a phone knew that would never happen.
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I agree. They've had time if they cared about making this product before the Steam Deck was a success, but much like with cloud infrastructure, or search engines, or MP3 players, or mobile, or game consoles in general, they only really cared about it after someone else made a great version of what they could have been doing themselves.
The Xbox system is a windows based system optimised to run on the consoles hardware. It has been since launch. Modifying it for handhelds with the ability to navigate to a desktop environment. The addition of a desktop environment isn't so difficult that it should take three years to accomplish. They launched windows 11 4 years ago and it didn't take but a few months for them to start shoehorning AI into every crevice of it.
Asus has a product already in production that could be used for the purposes of test bench testing and development. The original ROG Ally is even around the same price point as a steam deck.
So all in all the only two excuses MS has are that they are bad at understanding trends and getting in on the ground floor, and they are bad at optimising windows specifically because that goes against their business plan to gather user data and weaponize that data against their competitors.
All.in all we don't have an Xbox handheld at this point because they're greedy and fail to act on trend analysis.
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That is literally what they’re doing.
And failing, apparently
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God Microsoft is just taking so many L's. How can they make so much money and be so bad at managing Xbox?
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That’s why they’re doing this. The sleeping dragon is waking up. They’re gonna pour all of their marketing effort into killing the Steam Deck because of the threat it represents for consumer Windows.
They have no leverage, no exclusive games and their DirectX moat is filled by Proton/Vulkan
