Strong new exclusives and a clear generational jump plus BC has worked well for them for over 25 years (PS3 to PS4 aside) and for their gamers too, but somehow when MS has a problem cracking it and dominating then problem is the console generations model which needs to be replaced... yup...
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MS is doing what they think it is best, trying to disrupt the market and replace it with the Windows PC one, it does not mean it is the best thing for console gaming in and of itself nor the only viable model.
You are not incorrect about apps support on macOS, but it is not macOS itself that is not supporting the HW (their HW jumps causing that are very very infrequent, look how many years back macOS supports in terms of HW, same if not better for iOS). Forward compatibility is a bit trickier but it is more like backward deployment than forward compatibility... semantics (min deployment SDK vs target SDK) perhaps. What you do gain on macOS and iOS especially for the tradeoff you were alluding to (and over exaggerating as there is many years old software running with the latest iOS 14 beta without any trouble) is a much tighter ecosystem integration and sometimes better use of HW generally (especially on mobile... see the security improvements with Apple planning A chips together with iOS revisions... look at arm64e for examples of that).
MS’s dream is something just like iOS and as tightly controlled running from PC’s to consoles to wearables... and consoles. The latter coupled with generationless talks and GaaS models is what I have a problem with as it attacks what I believe consoles are for and why I like them
To be honest I think oldergamer is completely wrong here:
This is akin to the difference between apple and ms on pc in looser terms. Apple is perfectly fine releasing new os versions that told people you have to buy all new software, where as ms lets you run apps on Windows dating back to years
This has nothing to do with why Apple has the smaller market share, Microsoft sold windows the operating system, it never traditionally made or sold hardware, Apple originally sold hardware and it made the OS to sell that hardware. Apple has never opened up macOS or OSX to third party hardware vendors and has always tightly controlled their operating system to their own hardware. The reason why windows exploded is I think someone like compaq reverse engineered the IBM bios and made IBM pc clones, IBM took them to court and lost, but also IBM never saw this as anything major they were more interested in the mainframe business. This allowed cheap clones to burst on the scene which gave rise to Intel and the x86 instruction set and to the PC space we know today.
I also completely agree with you, Microsoft has been peering at apple walled garden and the google advertising market with some jealousy for some time now, its tried to imitate the same luck it had with the PC space, first it was zune vs ipod that failed, then the smart phones where it actually went after android and that failed and destroyed nokia in the process.
Now its the cloud where it has Amazon AWS and Google GCE as its main competitors but AWS is by far the market leaders.
Also its trying desperately to build a walled garden around windows applications, Windows 8 was an attempt at releasing an apple style walled garden and that has so far failed.
They have no smart phone business that failed miserably, so they cant build an IOS style walled garden anyway.
The reason why they say Sony isn't their competitor but Google and Amazon are is because they want to be the market leaders in cloud compute, it wont happen, but ultimately stuff like gamepass and xcloud are probably internally linked and its their attempt to build market share and move game publishers and their development teams on to azure as the compute platform for their services. I think Satya Nadella's main focus is and has always been growing out Azure, I don't think he cares at all about the games consoles. The reason they entered the console space was to stick a windows pc into the living room, that was the goal but smartphones and tablets are the main compute for living rooms not games consoles - the final attempt at this was the xbox 1 a console that could sort of play games, but its main purpose was to be the living room / entertainment PC tv,tv,tv,sports,tv,sports,tv, that also failed.
blog.playstation.com
