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The rumors of an Xbox 360 price reduction came true today, but it turned out to only be a clearance sale on the 20GB version as Microsoft has replaced it with an 60GB version at the old price:
Microsoft Corp. is giving consumers more gigabytes for their buck. The company today announced an Xbox 360 console with triple the storage space of the original console, but for the same price of $349 (U.S.) estimated retail price (ERP).
Available in retail stores in the U.S. and Canada starting in early August, the upgraded Xbox 360 will include a 60GB hard drive for storing the growing wealth of digital entertainment available for the console, including music, movies, television shows and game content. In addition, Microsoft today dropped the price of its 20GB Xbox 360 console in the U.S. and Canada to just $299 (U.S.) (ERP) while supplies last, a savings of $50.
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Xbox 360 is just one of three Xbox 360 gaming and entertainment systems Microsoft offers. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Arcade, which comes with a 256MB memory unit and five Xbox LIVE Arcade games, is a value for the whole family for $279 (U.S.) (ERP), and the premium Xbox 360 Elite console is available with a 120GB hard drive for $449 (U.S.) (ERP).
Presumably cost reductions on the base electronics and on hard drives make it all doable at a profit or not too much of a loss. Don’t expect Nintendo or Sony to follow suit though:
I’m just waiting for Sony’s release now to complete the picture by saying something along the lines of: “No way, our $399 (40GB) and $499 (80GB) models are still bargains, considering you get a Blu-ray player.”
Seriously, Sony has said they’re not going to cut prices during E3, but there is a rumored new model coming in August.
Originally, the Sony PS3 seemed overpriced, but Blu-ray may well have saved the PS3 or the PS3 may have saved Blu-ray depending on how you look at it.
Steve Lohr reports at the New York Times that Intel is not going to upgrade its internal PC users to Windows Vista:
Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said.
The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.
“This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said.
I would observe that there is a difference between upgrading everyone and an orderly migration, but this story was broken by Charlie Demerjian in The Inquirer where the decision is phrased as “Intel is not going to use Vista on its corporate machines… ever.”
Ouch! Such enterprise decisions aren’t uncommon for a variety of reasons, but for Intel to do it has got to hurt. The only thing that would hurt worse would be if Intel decided to go with a non-Microsoft operating system.
After Toshiba surrendered the high definition DVD war to Blu-ray last week, the remaining supporters of HD DVD have been announcing their revised plans. Yesterday Microsoft’s were revealed on their Gamerscore blog:
As a result of recent decisions made by Toshiba, Hollywood studios, and retailers, Microsoft plans to withdraw from HD DVD. Xbox will no longer manufacture new HD DVD players for the Xbox 360, but we will continue to provide standard product and warranty support for all Xbox 360 HD DVD Players in the market. As we stated earlier, we do not believe this decision will have any material impact on the Xbox 360 platform or our position in the marketplace. HD DVD is one of the several ways we offer a high definition experience to consumers and we will continue to give consumers the choice to enjoy digital distribution of high definition movies and TV shows directly to their living room, along with playback of the DVD movies they already own.
Frankly, the statement is a trifle odd since it seems to promise some sort of ongoing HD DVD compatibility and there is no mention of Blu-ray support. LG Electronics says it will continue to provide dual format players for a while, and I suppose Microsoft could well do the same, but HD DVD drives are soon going to be rather scarce.
One other thing that is odd is that back in 2005 Microsoft was one of the leaders of the HD DVD cause with a public fulmination by Bill Gates among others, but the last ditch battles seem to have been fought by Toshiba alone while Microsoft was publicly AWOL.
The final version details for Windows Server 2008 were revealed today at the Microsoft TechEd IT Forum 2007 in Barcelona by Bob Kelly, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Infrastructure Server Marketing. To anyone familiar with Microsoft’s past server operating systems, there isn’t much that’s particularly novel except in regard to the new Viridian virtualization capability which has now been formally named Hyper-V:
