Xbox One: The one Xbox to rule them all

I have seen the future of the living room computer, and it has a Microsoft logo on it. No, I’m serious. Stop laughing. Really.

I’m talking about the Xbox One, which was finally unveiled this week after literally years of teasing and the slow drip of feature upgrades to the now 8-year-old Xbox 360. Technically, I haven’t seen it — I’ve only read about it. In fact, all the people who wrote about it were seeing a canned Microsoft demo, where everything always looks good. But the Xbox One sounds megacool, if also a little unsettling — more on that last part in a bit.

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Microsoft has been down this road a few times, to be sure. There was its $425 million purchase of WebTV in 1997, which resulted in, well, nothing. Once for a brief period in the mid-1990s I had a Gateway Destination Windows PC-TV in my living room. It was a $4,000 monstrosity that came with its own 200-pound 31-inch CRT. I think they delivered it with a forklift and had to remove part of my roof to take it out.

Microsoft made a huge push to out-TiVo TiVo with XP Media Center in the early 2000s, though the company essentially gave up promoting it by the time Vista came along. Over the years there have been numerous other attempts to foist Windows PCs, Windows landline phones, and Windows home control systems onto a public that really didn’t want them.

The one-of-a-kind Xbox One

This time, though, is different. Xbox One is not Windows. Sure, it has Windows 8’s don’t-call-it-Metro tiles, but the similarity ends there. The original Xbox is barely even a Microsoft product. It emerged from a skunkworks project more than a decade ago and has been kept at a safe distance from Stevie Ballmer’s Flying Chair Circus throughout most of its life. Aside from the Red Ring of Death debacle, it’s the least Microsofty product Microsoft has ever made. That means it actually has a shot of succeeding where all the other Microsoft attempts have failed.

Like the current Xbox, the One incorporates living room entertainment; you can play movies on disc; watch Netflix, Amazon Video, cable TV, and so on; and just plain game on it. It also employs the Kinect camera-based motion-sensing interface Microsoft unveiled in 2010. I’ve used the Kinect in the past, and I have to say I was impressed. It works so well you’d never think it was made by Microsoft.

The new Kinect does even more; not only can it be controlled by voice and simple hand gestures and recognize your face when you enter the room, it can also measure your heartbeat while you’re jumping around in front of your couch. Whether it can also alert the paramedics if you have a heart attack has yet to be determined, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

A sign that the One may conquer America’s living rooms is, perversely, that gamers are not particularly excited by it. An online survey by IGN revealed that three out of four thought the One announcement was a yawner. The One won’t play old Xbox 360 games or use existing controllers either. Clearly teens and 20-somethings are not the target market for this Xbox — you and I are.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has declared the Xbox One as the fulfillment of Steve’s dream — Jobs, that is, not Ballmer.

Today, I saw something very close to Steve Jobs’ dream device. Just like he envisioned, this machine turns itself into the hub of your living room. It plays video games, Blu-ray discs, TV shows, and everything you could possibly want from the Internet. It switches between this stuff seamlessly–you can forget about the Input button. And it does indeed have the simplest user interface imaginable, an eerily accurate voice recognition system that is far more intuitive than a remote control….

Microsoft has done what Apple has long been rumored to do. It has created a near-perfect living room machine, one that has the potential to finally make it simple for you to watch or play anything you want, from anywhere, very quickly.

If that doesn’t get the Apple fanboys frothing at the mouth, I don’t know what will.

Where your Windows and Office dollars went

In short, the Xbox One capitalizes on the billions of dollars Microsoft has poured into R&D on user interfaces in a way Windows and Office never have. And that’s why I say it’s the future of home computing. Because people don’t want to type, touch, or click; they want to talk to their computers like on “Star Trek.” They want to wave stuff in and out of view like Tom Cruise in “Minority Report.” They want the future we were promised 50 years ago.

But that future has some dark clouds hanging over it, as Abine Technology’s Sarah Downey points out. The ability to automatically recognize your face means that Microsoft, its partners, and its advertisers will know exactly who’s sitting in front of the screen at all times. That means they’ll know what you like to play, watch, and do, and they’ll tailor their marketing accordingly. Because the One relies heavily on cloud processing and storage, you may have fewer privacy rights in regard to what you store online and how the feds can access it.

These aren’t unsolvable problems, but they’re things we should all be thinking about before we step into the brave new world of our living rooms.

Would you buy an Xbox One? Why or why not? Post your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Xbox One: The one Xbox to rule them all,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe toCringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.