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by wildranter 4893 days ago
Failure? I can't see they failing in the long run. They have a monopoly in mind share and bundles with virtually all new laptops (apart from Macs and some Ubuntu machines).

They took this route with Xbox and all went well in the end. Secret, keep iterating the damn product.
2 comments
kalid 4893 days ago
Market share and mind share don't keep a company alive; profits do.

Xbox is not profitable over its lifetime (http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/07/15/how-one-of-microsofts...). Windows PC sales are down 20% from last year (http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33642_7-57556199-292/windows-8-...).

Microsoft has negligible presence in the high-margin mobile and tablet space. By contrast, Apple makes hundreds of dollars from each phone/tablet sale. Phones are repurchased every 2 years, and Apple originally got $18 per user per month for each iPhone subscriber (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9803657-37.html). Microsoft makes ~$50 from one-time PC purchases, which are replaced every 4-5 years.

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orionblastar 4893 days ago
The XBox 360 still sucks and has the red ring of death problem, and if bumped some models even scratch the disk in the drive ruining it.

The XBox is a success because of exclusive video game titles on it. Plus gamers have to keep getting their XBox repaired or replaced to keep playing games.

Some stupid Internet advice tell people to reset the XBox when it has a red ring of death by throwing a towel or blanket over it. That causes overheating, and in some cases fries the CPU or other parts and then they have to buy a new XBox. I don't know why, when the main problem of the XBox overheating is a bad heat sink and poor quality in cooling the equipment, for a solution to that is to apply more heat so the system resets the red ring of death?

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Jam0864 4893 days ago
The heat causes the brittle solder joints to crack; applying more heat melts the solder and "reflows" it.

This is a common fix for PC video cards too.

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arde 4893 days ago
More easily said than done, though.
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wildranter 4893 days ago
Platform lock is a very efficient way of achieving a profitable business. I imagine they have some experience with this model.
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