Archive for April, 2009

SCEE CEO David Reeves announced that he is retiring at the end of the month.

Glancing at his bio, he is more than the typical sales/marketing/mba business type: He has a PhD in Astrophysics and Chemical Engineering from Cambridge University and he speaks English, French, and German fluently. It’s very rare (but inspiring) to see PhD-types rise to high level business positions like that.

He had a surprising comment regarding his retirement:

“Secondly, I am going to spend my time now trying to repay society for all I have taken from it. If your children are having physics lessons at the local school or wondering why their ski instructor is very elderly, your car mechanic has a bad back, or the social worker keeps bringing you PSP games, then it could just be me! Good luck to everybody at SCEE and everybody who continues to support us.”

He easily made many millions during his time at Sony. Why would he even mention those cushy low-pay retirement jobs? Many retirees like low-stress jobs like that for reasons beyond the pay, but still… That quote doesn’t sound like it’s coming from a voluntary retirement decision.

In an interview, SCEA hardware marketing boss John Koller, says:

“Microsoft has had a much more lenient policy to writing cheques than we do”

“We don’t feel the need to write cheques necessarily with every publisher, like they did with the Lost and Damned and some other titles, because we feel very strongly in our first-party line-up.”

First, it’s generally a better idea to speak positively about your own products rather than speak negatively about competition, but more to the point…

Microsoft’s position is intentional. They don’t want to be in the content business. They want to be in the technology infrastructure business. They want to own all technology used to author games, sell games, and play the games: the protocols, languages, APIs, and codecs. They want to earn toll-keeper fees from the traffic that rides on top of their platform.

This is Microsoft’s position with

Music

Microsoft has custom music codecs, e-commerce tech, and playback tech, but they clearly have no interest in managing individual music artists.

Movies

Microsoft has custom movie codecs (VC-1), authoring software, playback technologies (Silverlight, Windows Media, Zune), and they’ve done extensive lobbying to push those into popular use, but they aren’t involved (and don’t want to be involved) in funding or managing movie production.

Games

They aggressively promote their own authoring tools (Visual Studio IDE, Microsoft programming languages, and DirectX APIs), e-commerce platform, and playback technology (Xbox, Live, Zune, etc). However, they don’t want to be involved with the actual content production. They will buy exclusive content, but only when necessary to drive traffic to their technology platform