Microsoft’s Xbox Live Anywhere on Vista more of a vaporware than PS3 home
By Mike Ferro
Remember that cool concept Bill Gates himself made a big deal two years ago during Vista’s big push, called Xbox Live Anywhere? Most people assumed Anywhere-became-vaporware, with very little news or update released at all for sometime now.
Xbox Live Anywhere was the new middleware piece that was used to push Vista’s Games for Windows-Live back a couple years ago in 2006. A concept which was hyped by Microsoft as the revolutionary social networking solution that would bind all of their products PC, console and mobile phone/Zune.
Well, its mid 2008 and we still haven’t seen it, nor heard anything about it-that is until just recently. Microsoft’s VP of marketing Jeff Bell gave a extremely short update on Anywhere. According to Kotaku when inquired about Anywhere he stated “Live anywhere is not abandoned, it’s just not easy to do.”
The Live Anywhere campaign was launched in 2006 hyping two of their titles pushing Vista: Halo 2, and Shadowrun. Both titles were harshly criticized for forcing users to upgrade their OS from XP to Vista in order to play those titles.
It was a silly ploy on Microsoft’s behalf to try to shove Vista down consumer’s throats by having a “Only for Vista” requirement ignoring their more successful XP platform. Suffice to say sales for both titles tanked, especially Shadowrun which was the flag ship title to boast anything close to what Anywhere could eventually offer.
Shadowrun allowed interoperability between Vista and Xbox users, which was what was offered in Anywhere. However sadly this move ended with this game, as no other games have had this capability integrated.
The key piece, mobile interoperability with Anywhere is even more MIA than any of the other components.
Hold on a sec.-didn’t Aaron Greenberg Director of Product Management for Microsoft slam Sony for failed promises with PS3 home recently? Maybe next time Aaron should look at the running list of failed promises from Microsoft, you know just to be fair.
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May 27th, 2008
So true. Its funny that so much flack gets thrown at Home when Sony are clearly progressing with it yet Live Anywhere gets totally ignored lol
Greenberg slams Sony for Home yet conveniently forgets Live Anywhere just like he forgot Alan Wake when he slammed the delay on Killzone 2.
June 4th, 2008
Maybe when it comes to the video games aspect, you are fully correct.
But have you forgotten the immense popularity of msn, or windows live messenger, and windows live hotmail? At least they kept the promise that you can use msn on your xbox, vista, xp, windows handheld, and cell phone. I personally think that that is pretty impressing. I dont know about some people, but I find msn to be a vital service.