Amazon poaches Microsoft games chief

Amazon has poached one of the brains behind Microsoft's fabulously successful Xbox and Xbox Live, hinting at a rival cloud-based gaming strategy. Director of games platform strategy Andre Vrignaud has left Microsoft for Amazon after eight years, having helped turn Microsoft into a top-ranking games brand. Vrignaud blogged in …

[Richard Steiner]

Microsoft's fabulously successful Xbox ... ?

Successful? The Xbox part of the company didn't turn a profit in its history until this year, and if Microsoft wouldn't have been able to leverage its existing monopolies in the software marketplace to keep the Xbox folks on life support for seven years, it never would have.

Not only that ... while the Xbox 360 is arguably a nice piece of hardware, it's locked down to the point where most users don't care even comtemplate adding third-party hardware without risking having their XBox Live accounts blacklisted.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is going to hurt...

A home for all those banned ps3 and xbox-live users.

I don't have one, but I'd be really annoyed if I had topay more for games on a piracy-free platform.

Mine's the one with Steam coming out of the collar...

[JDX]

Love how the Anti-fanbois...

... feel honour-bound to find _every_ MS-related product to be cack. Doing so just makes your arguments weaker, like the boy who cried wolf. Xbox-live is a massive success, and Xbox has gone from nothing to be a viable contender for top-spot in the console market - overtaking Nintendo. All this despite it being a relatively new area.

It's not like Sony make loads of profit from the PS3 hardware. And building a brand is not all about short-term profit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anti Fanbois here

I hate Microsoft, have done for over a decade, since Internet explorer 4 and Visual C++ integration. However I actually quite like XBox. Its the only piece of MS infrastructure that I've paid money for, amongst the Linux Boxes and Macs and Virtual Boxed WinXP instances laying around my home.

So in my view its certainly a success to have someone like me buy one. (Although its not the only console in use).

The Amazon kindley stuff I wish them good luck with, as Amazon tend to do lots of really good things in the background (Cloud services/storage etc) while most people just see the Amazon store front . Just ordered a Kindle because it looks kind of useful and pretty inexpensive plus can apparently handle PDFs along with the proprietary stuff.

[Gareth.]

XBox a viable contender for top-spot

I don't know if I'm a fanboi or an anti-fanboi - I hate all 3 companies equally (I'm not an avid game player so I doubt any of them is worried about it). However, I'm intrigued by what criteria you're judging Microsoft's XBox as being a viable contender for top-spot in the console market.

As I understand it, Microsoft - or rather the gaming department - are not the most profitable of the 3 console manufacturers so it can't be based on revenue.

Similarly, the Wii has consistently outsold the XBox since its launch - Wikipedia told me that Microsoft has sold 41M XBoxes whereas Nintendo has sold 74M Wiis, therefore it's not based on userbase either.

I'm not saying the XBox360 is a bad console - I own one even though I'm not a gamer. I just don't think that it's ready to be in the number one slot. At the end of the day, though, competition is good for the consumer, so I'm glad the XBox360 was released. However, it's blatantly clear that if Microsoft didn't have such deep pockets then the XBox would have gone the same way as the Sega Saturn.

[Mickey Porkpies]

your avin a larf

My kindle crashes regular as clockwork when using the browser function. It is a fabulous ebook but as a web interface or even games interface it is sadly lacking.

[Ascylto]

Hmmmmmmmm.

Should be nothing for the Microsoft man to do, then.