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Well...I'll surely instruct my SPAM filter to not mark any message offeing bucks if "I use the beta version o the next email client" Microsoft releases! ;-)
Beating your friends is one thing, but for the whole thing to have a pinnacle is for me, critical.
I remember when the ngage came out, one major appeal was the intenrational league of points (for a game), but after a while the appeal soon wore off.
That said, achievable, tangible benefits appropriate to each MS product being used is a great idea!
Having said that, you can see how this could become an ever-escalating 'arms war' where the value of points keep going up and up to lure users; the value only being limited by the ROI of converting a user.
I usually think you have a lot of insight, but I have to disagree on this one.
I bought a 360 in December 2005 (paid extra to get it) and think it is an awesome system. I vaguely pay attention to my achievements score - mostly relative to other people in my friends list and especially people I actually really know outside of gaming.
But there is absolutely no way I would use Windows Live over Google, etc., to boost that score. I just don't care that much about it.
Maybe there are some gamers out there who do, but with a total of roughly 10MM 360s sold, that subset of 360 owners is in no way big enough to give MSFT an "edge on Google."
To me, the cool thing about earning an achievement is when you do it by doing something in a game - e.g. getting a certain number of kills in a multiplayer round, making it through a round without sustaining any damage, etc. I can't imagine many people getting excited by earning achievements by sending Hotmail - I mean Windows Live Mail or whatever they're calling it these days, etc.
There are a lot of great things about the 360 ecosystem, and I am sure many more to come, but I just don't see this as being realistic.
Thanks for all of the great work you do. I enjoy your blog a ton.
H.
Token Economies are great with Children. They're used a lot in classrooms. I always thought playing video games was child-like (I am a huge gamer - BTW), and the use of points in the XBox 360 proves it.. :)
However, Robert, I hope Microsoft never pushes achievements beyond games. That would completely invalidate the system and ruin it permanently. The achievements are a sign that you achieved something in a game. Given, most games have a few easy achievements. But they all have harder ones that require you to actually be good at the game. There's no way to be "good" at using Microsoft products. When I see somebody who has 10,000+ GamerScore, I know that person is a mad man. If in the future, seeing 10,000+ means I found somebody who loaded up Microsoft Office 100 times or performed a bunch of searches online, the game's over and Microsoft loses one of the things that made their console better than the competition.
Achievements are cool, especially with gamers as as they confirm or deny l33t status, just as having the best items and level in WoW shows how good you are (apart from those people that buy them).
What I wonder about is whether the achievements and points will be only a symbol of recognition or whether I will be able to use them for something like getting earlier access to Betas or other goodies.
When Xbox live launched in 2002, one of the first games available was Ghost Recon, a port of the original PC game. That game had a dossier system with 50 objectives that could be achieved in the single-player modes. Each objective unlocked an aspect of the multiplayer game (character, map, game type, or weapon) that made the experience more fun for the player and encouraged his team mates and adversaries to share the single player experience more vividly.
To date, none of the next generation games have utilized the point system in this manner. The application transfers to the non-game world, as you pointed out, but I don't think that Microsoft really gets it.
I do agree that they are addictive, and actually makes me want to play older games to unlock them.
It is always good to see that The Major competitors introduce creative ideas to increase their popularity instead of just getting involved in negative add campaigns.
I do not have an Xbox, however, I have to disagree with you on this. Using a games points system to increase traffic to a site or use services will only work with the gamers and only when they are playing the games. This may increase Microsoft's exposure but only for a short period.
The business world is what is going make or break to big software companies, if you can get a company a more secure, faster, cheaper way to run it's business and manipulate business intellegence, then you are going to win.
This idea for gam points is great idea, but only for gamers.
Guy
isn't this just going to lead to hyper inflation of ms points?
won't they ultimately lose value?
There are 10 million Xbox 360 users out there and giving the 360's growth curve (which has actually been disappointing given it's head start), it's unlikely Achievements would make much of a dent at all.
Although I do have to say, I think Xbox Live is the single best platform Microsoft has ever put together. It certainly far surpasses Windows.
http://www.asp.net/resources/community-recognit...
If Microsoft wants people to stop using Google, and start using Live, then MS needs to make their search systems find stuff significant better than Google does. There's loads of ways they could do this - but they just seem to completely lack the ability to deliver anything but mostly inferior copies of what Google is delivering.
I'm actually quite surprised at how badly MS is doing. Google has left quite a lot of low-hanging fruit on the search tree - in text search, and image search (and video search). Low-hanging fruit that really could make people think about switching.
This stuff really shouldn't be that hard for a company in Microsoft's position. That real barrier to entry in this stuff is computer hardware and bandwidth, so most start-ups can't compete because of cash constraints. That's not an issue for Microsoft.
Actually, I'm more than surprised at MS. I'm embarrassed for them. I mean - not only is there low-hanging fruit in the search space itself, but MS owns the most popular damn browser on the planet. And if you own the browser, then there's some truly *amazing* things you could do with search. By amazing - I mean things that could totally blow Google away.
Ho hum... never mind. Not my problem... as they say!
The bigger story and threat to eBay (PayPal) and Google (Checkout and Adsense) here is using Microsoft Points ($$) as a micropayment system outside the Live Marketplace, interfacing with Adcenter, and letting affiliates shave pennies promoting content in the Live Marketplace.
Imagine bloggers being able to run contextual AdCenter ads for Live content and make part of the sale from referred sales?
This is what Google needs to be most concerned about and I think that will happen someday. The achievement score thing is a nice sideshow attraction, but it's not a direct revenue producer if anybody can earn them by doing stuff on the web for free (like searches).
Seems better to have them be tied to buying a product or service, like they are now.
To avoid getting too lengthy here, I'll continue these thoughts in a post and link back in.
Competitions are only fun when you win sometimes (or atleast you have a hope to win). With something like points. Only the top few would be can be kept interested.
And hey what happens to the baby who gets born on 2020? Would he have to compete with someone born 40 years before him?
I think Microsoft struggles to do this because of its perception in the market - and the fact that people have to pay for their main suite of products. (Ironically, there isn't much you can do with writely though that you can't do with pre-loaded MS Works!). Google is fantastic at using its name to push (often entirely search un-related) products but if they weren't so good people just wouldn't use them.
I agree with you though in the opportunities that the browser hold for MS. In the same way that Google search by its very dominance and name, bred related (and unrelated) Google products, so should MS browser attempt to do the same.
Integration of basic word, excel, powerpoint etc. into the browser are easy to achieve...but then again what would the competition commissions have to say about integration of such tools into their browser?
Maybe the fact that they would be online resources (accessed via the browser) would ensure they escape the bundling problems the media player encountered.
The unrelated browser-product field is a different kettle of fish. As Firefox 2.0 shows, the browser as we know it has come as far as it can go. Even Flock isn't massively radical. I think that if MS are to use the browser to launch un-related browser products, they need to re-evaluate how the browser is used.
I love geek gadgets far more than most, but please, can we have grown men act like it. My kids earn neopoints on neopets.com, and they're really happy that they've got 90+ thousand of them. I never would have thought that adults would get sucked into the same marketing/ego/nonsense vortex.
I hate this "adultescent" stuff.
John: you ever fly on an airline? You ever hear of "frequent flier miles or points?"
Same thing.
Marketers have been doing this to us for years.
Are you talking about that company that has to buy their way through techmeme sponsorship just to "be part of the conversation"?
Take a look at MSDN blogs : so many blogs, and yet virtually no comment anywhere.
Give me a break, Scoble.
I understand you are willing to save an endangered specy though.
And as to what 'caring' about my gamerscore means, basically, it tends to make me play 360 games instead of the games I have on other systems.
"Reality is rarely relevant" (Google = 0, Live = 0)
Which makes sense, since "It is perceptions that count..."
bob wyman
I wasn't talking about the other stuff like on-line office applications etc. The main opposition to MS Office - Google office apps, and OpenOffice - hasn't united to create a single offering. *Big* mistake. Both of those are pretty shoddy offerings, in comparison to Office 2007. MS will continue to whip their asses in the office app game.
No, if you want to stop people going to Google, a points system is going to be in the noise. What you need to do is make your search engine significantly better than Google's. Remember AltaVista? Everyone used to use that. They thought it was an amazing search engine. What could be better than that? Then Google came along. It was a step change. And everybody switched.
Same thing.
Marketers have been doing this to us for years.
And those are probably even less useful unless you're a serious flyer. I fly 2-3 times a year, the frequent flyer miles expire before I can ever use them.
If you're a fan, they're great, but if you aren't deeply in the XBox/Zune world, they're rather useless. Acquiring points you can't use makes them have no value. Of course, considering how Microsoft obfuscates the point-money relationship in the Zune store, that's probably what they're gambling on.
@ original post - Pirillo needs to get a life. seriously. he has a wife to take care of, surely...
The only way that points would matter is if they had real value. The problem then is that it is trivial to "game" the system. I could easily write a plug-in for Firefox that takes any Google search and duplicates it for MS search in a separate tab that I don't actually look at.
For some reason, all this reminds me of Blade Runner. Robert, I still think we'll all see you blogging for the Tyrell Corporation while all while, all this personal information will allow the government to blog us. There goes any hope of privacy and what little anonymity we currently enjoy.
I don't care what Scott McNealy (former Sun CEO) said about "get over your privacy -- you don't have any..." I so disagree with that.
I thin you love your 60inch Sony HD TV. How much did you pay for it? How much would you pay for it today? I am sure much less. Why? Because the companies always want to in an arm race to beat each other prices.
Google does not want to do that. That is an anti-thesis of a capital economy. It is not the search which makes Google $150 Billion company. It is the business model which is broken. Instead of Google being in the arm race to beat each other prices, it puts its consumers in the arm race to beat each other bids! Wonderful for Google but evil for public. Each search public do on Google, the public pay 10 cents to 20 cents to Google (estimated). Obviously it does not cost this much to Google to serve each search. Any other business model would put Google in the realm of normal competitive market and it would then keep marginally higher than what it costs.
Now look at the comment number 5 on this post. This comment actually nails the market dynamism. Microsoft rewrads users, then Yahoo rewards and then Google does. Finally users would see big bucks. It would be easily possible to give back few dollars every month to a search user, therefore Google starts competing. The main problem is the comment number 45. It is easy to game the system.
"John: you ever fly on an airline? You ever hear of “frequent flier miles or points?”
Same thing.
Marketers have been doing this to us for years."
I am not aware of anything that I can truly trade for of value using the Xbox 360. Am I missing something? I can trade my miles for flights on the airlines...
Note: I am actually a fan of your blog. I just don't see how the mentioned item(s) will really change anything for MS.
What are any of these companies really hoping to achieve?
Microsoft is an OS/apps company. That is their bread and butter.
Google is a once-good search engine company turned into a marketing/advertising compamy.
Yahoo is the only company out there that has any hope of turning itself into a real, pervasive media company. I can see Yahoo becoming a TV network one day. I can see them as THE bridging portal from offline to online life. I just cannot see MS or Google ever being anything other than what they are. MS has had some success with its Xbox, but I cannot see them ever trumping Nintendo or Sony.
I want to see a company do one thing and do it well, not try to be all things to all people.
Look at traditional Italian pizza places. The real places, not those that call themselves "traditional" places. They make and sell ONLY pizza. Not calzones, not deep dish pizza, not salads, JUST tradtional pizza. The few places that do this make a killing. If a search company just did search and nothing else, they would make a killing. Forget the ads, forget the marketing. Just do search and do it better than all others. Sell search devices. Consult on data mining and search. I want to see just a search company. The closest we have to this is Ask.com, unfortunately.
Because then everyone gets it at a reduced cost instead of the motivated cheap bastiges :-)
Same thing with the points. Microsoft knows that the usage rate on that crap will NEVER hit 100%, so they can reap great PR while doing no real work.
But then again, no one ever got poor gambling on the laziness or stupidity of the US Consumer.
Keith Knutsson