Stardate 20011212.0704 (On Screen): Xbox is here, and apparently works. It's
selling well, but it will be years before it's profitable for Microsoft. That's OK; Microsoft makes its plans long; it thinks it is better to win big in ten years than to win small in two (an attitude which other companies should learn to emulate). But with Xbox Microsoft is taking a big chance, for the hardware is being sold at a massive loss in expectation of making it back on royalties from games. At the core what you've got is a very decent PC being sold for $300, with an ethernet connection, a big disk, a lot of memory and a fast processor, all in a small convenient self-contained box. On a hardware basis it's actually much better than my Qube 3. There's no particular hardware reason that an Xbox couldn't make a superb little self-contained web server.
But if it were used that way, Microsoft wouldn't be able to sell games to that particular Xbox owner, and would take a loss on that unit. So Microsoft has a vested interest in making sure that the Xbox cannot be used that way. The nightmare scenario for Microsoft is a CD or DVD which is put into the drive which contains Linux and Apache and whatever and looks to Xbox like a game. Once the game "starts" it takes over the system and does much the same thing that my Qube 3 does. Or perhaps Apache alone could run on top of the Xbox OS, keeping its files as "saved game data" on the HD. Is there hope of this? I think so, and I'm actually tempted to go buy one on speculation just in case someone pulls it off. It's been out less than a month, and hacks have already torn them apart and are doing their best to break into Microsoft's security. Microsoft has been known to leave holes before which could be exploited to take over their systems, after all.
I paid about $1400 all told for my Qube 3 which hosts this site. If other people can do the same thing for $300 plus, say, $50 for a CD from someone else, then you may see a boom in adoption of home broadband, another project dear to Microsoft's cold calculating little heart. (Even when it loses, Microsoft seems to win.) (discuss)
