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Tonight’s the night that Halo 3, the much hyped first person shooter and successor to the wildly popular Halo 2, launches exclusively on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and the early reviews seem quite positive. Microsoft badly needs a megahit if there is to be any hope of turning a quarterly profit sometime soon in its troubled Entertainment and Devices division and Halo 3 is the only real candidate. Via Eric Savitz at Barron’s, here’s a reading of the Halo 3 financial tea leaves:
Nick Mathiason at The Observer reports a tawdry tale in the UK in Microsoft in row over lobby tactics:
I see that I haven’t spared any pixels for MSN Soapbox, Microsoft’s YouTube clone, since it shut down temporarily in March due to the presence of the same copyright infringement problems that had Microsoft tut-tutting about YouTube. Apparently, Soapbox relaunched in April to little fanfare and ambled along in closed beta as before.
As if Microsoft’s Windows Vista didn’t have enough bad PR to contend with already, there’s the continuing embarrassment of the missing Vista Ultimate Extras. You may recall that the Extras are supposed to be “free programs, services, and related content” that you only get if you kick in for the pricey Ultimate Edition of Vista. The problem is that they seem to be mostly vaporware.
