Xbox One, Geared towards the Hardcore or the Living Room??

            

            On May 21, Microsoft announced the Xbox One; this is their next-gen outing of the Xbox 360 gaming console. This is the first time in the video game industry that a console generation lasted for more than five years. In this case it was been eight years since the last Xbox was released. During that time many advances in technological innovation forced the console evolve in order to compete http://goo.gl/bUPNP. Smartphones and tablets forced them to bring apps and services to the console, i.e. Netflix and Hulu. Social media, i.e. Facebook and Twitter, exploded during that time and became a huge part of how gamers interacted with one another. Along with streaming sites gamers were now able to immerse themselves fully into gaming.

           

              One of the biggest challenges that the Xbox team has faced was a way to draw the growing number of casual gamers to their console. Nintendo’s Wii had a solid hold on this market for years after its initial release. Microsoft and its main rival Sony, with their Playstation 3, had to scramble to meet the demand. Its solutions were the Playstation Eye and Xbox Kinect. To this day the growing market is the casual gamer aka women, parents, and grandparents. This is the market that has to be gained in order for any system to win the battle moving forward.

            At the Microsoft event I feel that Xbox has positioned itself as an entertainment console.During the course of their presentation they showcased different ways that they envision the Xbox One being used as an interactive media controller http://goo.gl/Ih9EF, enabling the device to be switched on and off by simply using the phrases “Xbox On” or “Xbox Off” and actually recognizing your voice and being able to log in to your unique homepage on the system. The stand out feature that I think is the catalyst to put more Xbox’s in people homes is the introduction of using the console as a conduit to control the programming on your television and altering the console-tv paradigm. Being able to control programming and manipulate what’s on the screen with the power of your voice and hands respectively, really help integrate the Kinect in to ecosystem of useful accessories of the Xbox to further control the visuals on the screen.The addition of Skype, which Microsoft acquired late last year, has also been heavily integrated in to the system as well putting social media as a priority going forward. All this sounds well and great for the new consumers not really into gaming, but what about the hardcore gaming fan base that has supported the console from the beginning.

  

               

               Earlier in the year Sony released information on their Playstation 4 console. Comparing the specs side-by-side you can see that the Xbox One has similar hardware only with minor differences http://goo.gl/dUuMo. The position Sony is taking is that their console is geared towards the hardcore gamers, a position backed by the lack of actual games being shown at the Xbox conference, where there was a plentiful amount at Sony’s conference. This was taken into account by the Microsoft Execs stating “ This event was to reveal and show off our vision for this console generation moving forward”. In three weeks the annual E3 press event where the biggest names in gaming show off their newest and latest games they’ve been working on. I feel there is were Xbox will show its tremendous game line up and declare that they have not forgot about the gamers that have got them to where they are today.

Mobile Wars

            Where as the old battleground for ultimate supremacy for consumer’s hearts and minds, as well as their wallets, was in the home computing market with the Mac vs. PC debate. During that time Apple had a brilliant marketing campaign basically pitting the two against each other showing off their strengths versus their competitors weaknesses. I found that kind of a lopsided battle because they were essentially fighting solely against an operating system, where they had a family of products and hardware that ran on similar software since Microsoft didn’t make any of the hardware that their OS was running on, enabling Apple to trounce all over them and will the battle in a landslide.

            Recently the battleground has shifted to people’s pockets not in the monetary sense but in the mobile phone market battleground. Apple has had a solid lead for years since their debut of the iPhone in 2007 coinciding with their partnership through AT&T being the only carrier to have the device. All other carriers have been playing catch up, until now! Apple and Samsung have been battling it out for cell phone supremacy since 2010 with the introduction of the Samsung Galaxy S series phone. Dragging each others name through the mud in the process. Apple has taken Samsung to court on many occasions over copyright and patent infringements on their iPhone product line. In many cases Apple have won and been granted injunctions on the sale of Samsung products in certain markets globally. Looking at that tells me one thing, that Apple sees Samsung as a threat to their business.

            Samsung just released their Galaxy S4 series phone globally. Samsung got really tired of their competition pushing them around and took a page out of Apple’s book and decided to fight fire with fire, replicating the strategy Apple used in the Mac vs. PC ads showing their strengths and pitting them against the competition. Samsung has just released a series of ads attacking iPhones “cool factor” amongst younger buyers who are the majority of new cell phones buyers here in the states. In their newest ads Samsung suggests that only old folks own an iPhone, and make some pretty good and funny points too goo.gl/5Iijy. In the ad there are parents and students at a college graduation party and the young kids are using their Galaxy S4s to take part in all the action http://goo.gl/8oguS. The ways in which this occurs are hilarious; such as taking a photo and offering the parents to see if they can smell the photo because it looks that good, or using the phone as a remote control for your TV. My favorite though was with the Galaxy phones you are able to bump phones and share content and when a parent tried to do the same thing with here iPhone 5 she was rejected and told she couldn’t do that. It is marketing like that at the most opportune time college graduation season, where parents are looking for cool gifts to get their kids for graduation and simultaneously always looking for grains of approval from their upstart, self-righteously technological children that this campaign works wonders http://goo.gl/Q2vkN.

            Samsung is hot on the heels of Apple when it comes to cell phone market share globally, and this round of advertising really shows that they are willing to pull out all the stops and ignore what’s happening to them in the courts to try and one up the competition who has dominated for so long. Samsung is pulling another Apple move in which they are partnering with Best Buy to bring the Samsung Experience to consumers http://goo.gl/CXS6K. This is a strategy designed to combat Apple’s growing number of Apple Stores by having a physical booth in retail stores in which to show off their family of electronic products.