Nat Brown is a person who claims to have been part of the original Xbox project team at Microsoft, and is even the person who gave it its name. And while he's proud with how far the console has gone, he's also incensed by its current state.
His specific complaints are centered on the past five years, this last one in particular, which have been "simply painful to watch". Brown cites how the Xbox brand has been getting by on the momentum of previous successes alone, how the Kinect is proof positive of the Xbox's inability to capitalize on innovation, and "complete lack of tactical versus strategic understanding of the long game of the living room".
All of Brown's points out outlined on his personal blog, and which are quite detailed, plus very much passionate. The following are selected excerpts from his rant, entitled "Stupid, Stupid xBox!!" (note the curious spelling; one can only assume that the Xbox was originally xBox, before the marketing department perhaps stepped in):
"xBox’s primary critical problem is the lack of a functional and growing platform ecosystem for small developers to sell digitally-/network-distributed (non-disc) content through to the installed base of xBox customers, period. Why can’t I write a game for xBox tomorrow using $100 worth of tools and my existing Windows laptop and test it on my home xBox or at my friends’ houses?"
… And it's true. Indie developers in particular have long given up on the XBLA marketplace and are finder greater freedom (and success) in completing marketplaces, like Sony's PSN and Apple's App Store.
"xBox’s secondary critical problem is that the device OS and almost the entire user experience outside the first two levels of the dashboard are creaky, slow, and full-of-shit. From built-in update and storage features to what they have allowed through negligence to appear in games…"
What immediately follows are a bunch of screenshots that details various system specific interactions that every Xbox owners knows all too well.
"… These messages and many others – impossible Xbox Live sign-in and password recovery, accounting/membership, to name just a few – are made all the worse by the huge amount of time that passes while waiting for content to load. You don’t turn on your xBox to play a game quickly — it takes multiple minutes to load, flow through its splash screens, and then get you playing."
Brown cites that these are the two fronts, the user experience and indie content, that Microsoft will lose in its battle for living room dominance with iOS and Android:
"Microsoft is living in a naive dream-world. I have heard people still there arguing that the transition of the brand from hardcore gamers to casual users and tv-uses was an intentional and crafted success. It was not. It was an accident of circumstance that Microsoft is neither leveraging nor in control of. "
Brown goes on to state that, when all is said and done, Apple may reign supreme with their Apple-TV. Not just over Microsoft, but everyone:
"Apple, if it chooses to do so, will simply kill Playstation, Wii-U and xBox by introducing an open 30%-cut app/game ecosystem for Apple-TV."
