Microsoft’s Halo Effect

A few years ago, if you had said that Microsoft would someday release a product that was so hotly anticipated that over 1.7 million people would pay for it in advance without so much as a beta, somebody might have wanted to check your medication. But Microsoft did that with Halo 3 this week, perhaps the biggest entertainment software release ever.

So, what does this have to do with the enterprise? Well, the XBox and Halo are examples of what Microsoft’s strengths and weaknesses are, and reveal a lot about what Microsoft is capable of: creating an application that allows real-time collaboration in a virtual world by teams of dozens of people who’ve never met, over a heterogeneous network–and all without so much as a “ipconfig /renew”.

So, why is it that the over on the business side, the Vista experience still seems so…well, lacking? My experience thus far with networking Vista hasn’t been a major improvement over XP, and the overhead required for the graphics — clearly XBox-inspired, as well as Mac inspired–has made performance on 2 gigabytes of RAM reminiscent of Windows 3.0 on 640 kilobytes. While Microsoft is promoting the ROI of Vista from a support standpoint, why do I feel like the usability of my business desktop just went down, rather than up?

The XBox 360 has demonstrated that Microsoft can do software like this right–if it can control the hardware platform. The reason why wireless networking and connecting to the internet and the rest of the XBox Live experience are so seamless is because Microsoft controls the whole platform — though it is still at the mercy of the Internet.

It’s interesting that perhaps the general-purpose computer that the XBox 360 platform most closely resembles is Apple’s. Some of the development for the XBox 360 was even done on Mac OS X, since the processors that power the XBox are based on the PowerPC architecture once favored by Apple.

Of course, Microsoft can’t have that level of control for Windows — it can’t lock people down to a specific hardware choice, or limit them to approved software. Vista is probably as close to the XBox platform as Microsoft can get — its security features and control over software and drivers, along with the system requirements to even get it running, gives Microsoft at least virtual control over the Vista experience, and locks parts of it out if the hardware and software aren’t up to snuff instead of giving you the Blue Screen of Death experience.

Halo is an example of Microsoft making good acquisitions, and doing the right thing with them. Bungie, which used to make game software that ran on the Mac, for crying out loud, has thrived under Microsoft’s rule, and has rewarded Redmond for its good judgement. The deal stands in sharp contrast with, say, Groove Networks, which gave Microsoft Ray Ozzie, but seemingly nothing else survived intact.

On the flipside, the XBox 360 also has demonstrated that Microsoft has trouble with the hardware side of things. With over a third of XBox 360 systems failing, it’s clear that hardware reliability isn’t in Microsoft’s core competency set–though there have been PC manufacturers who’ve had a DOA rate similar to that with simpler requirements.

So, maybe we’re lucky that Microsoft can’t provide the same end-to-end experience with Windows in the enterprise that it can with XBox in the living room.