I won’t be buying an Xbox 360

It’s just not that I bought an original Xbox that died a month out of warranty (so Microsoft decided I needed to send them $129 to fix it), scratched every disk that ever went in it, and generally was a pain in the ass. But Microsoft seems to have not learned something important about Xboxes: people like them because they are hackable. Never willing to actually take a hint from consumers about what they want, Microsoft has decided that it’s worthwhile to keep people from using their machines as they see fit.

Console manufacturers out there listening? If you make a machine that is hackable, I’ll buy one, just on the principle of the thing. I’ll buy games for it. Heck, I’ll write software for the thing. Stop treating your customers like crap.

2 thoughts on “I won’t be buying an Xbox 360”

  1. will culpepper

    Has any company EVER built a computer that was unhackable?

    Editor’s note: well, you could keep people from turning them on. That makes them unhackable. 🙂

    More seriously, each step at trying to “protect” content makes a computer less useable. You could:

    • Use expensive and/or custom media for storage (witness that little PSP disks, Sony Stick memory and the like)
    • Require expensive licensing for development systems (keeping small, innovative manufacturers from developing products for your platform)
    • Include cryptographic protocols in all network/disk accesses (slowing each access, and adding complexity)

    Each of these things makes development harder, and therefore harms consumers.

    Imagine what creative Xbox applications people could develop if Microsoft would just GET OUT OF THE WAY.

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