OneEng-
"There it is again ... PC mentality in embedded design."
Why should it be thought of as an embedded design? Perhaps the time has past having consoles living under this terminology.
"Adding more powerful hardware to make up for a fatter slower OS and code makes the entire product more expensive. The arguement always goes "delvelopment time is shorter so we make up the money there.". This isn't true. If you ship millions of units, the cost of development of the firmware is trivial."
What good would dropping 0.01% overhead do when talking about a 100GFLOPs+ machine? We are discussing a machine with an order of magnitude more power then Cray supercomputers from not too long ago.
You are looking at this from a hardware engineer point of view, I am looking at is from a developers point of view. After the first piece of hardware ships, it is done. Developers need to deal with the machine for many years after that, not hardware engineers.
"Embedded units are fast (no boot time), and rugged (you can drop kick them). PC's are just not like this."
There isn't any "boot time" on the X-Box, there was a significant load time for the original PSX though. Rugged? I have three dead PSXs here that disagree with that statement strongly(I know one person that has eight), not to mention the tens of thousands of problems users have already reported with the PS2's hardware after the Japanese launch(not that many problems, but that many users). We are talking about PS2 vs X-Box, if it were Nintendo then durability could be an issue, Sony has already lowered the bar significantly in this area.
"I suspect MS is going to attempt to leverage their massive MS DirectX game following. This is exactly why I beileve that they are attempting only cosmetic changes to their OS (cosmetic meaning that the basic kernel will still operate on the same basis as the PC)."
Why do you think this? Their DX game following isn't an issue, the PC gaming market is trivial at best compared to consoles. The point of DX that makes it so strong is the SDKs. It's like running the Win9X compared to command line Linux, one is just so much easier and when speaking of getting something done, the Win9X is going to be faster the overwhelming majority of the time for people who are familiar with it and have never used a Linux based OS(which IS the type of situation with dev kits).
"As for the hardware, by using a PIII, you necessarily have very "PCish" architecture. You can't really use a PC processor and not have a PC mentality."
So your saying the GameCube is also PCish? Just because the CPU is based on a design from PCs doesn't mean anything. There are no IRQs, there is no BIOS, there is no boot up, it is nothing like a PC.
"I simply think that attempting to move into embedded markets will show MS the limitations of its expertice."
I think your right. The single most important thing in the console wars is developer relations. MS knows this better then anyone. You are focusing too much on design choices for the platform, and not looking at how much easier it makes things for developers.
"Time to market with new games is important. The question is, can Sony move games to market with their system as fast as MS can with theirs. I would argue Yes. Sony has been doing this for some time and has built an infastructure for creating these games."
No, they haven't. In fact, Sony has done almost nothing at all to prove that they can ship software on time. Their dev kits are constantly late, they have very little in the way of support outside of tier one development houses for the PS2, and even then the support is getting extremely negative feedback. One person commented that what took them months to get up and running on a PS2 they had up in an afternoon using X-Box dev kits. That isn't a factor to be underestimated. Why not port a PS2 title over to X-Box if it can be done very easily with next to no added dev costs(in comparison). Conversly, why sink massive amounts of time and effort to port a X-Box title to the PS2?
"This means we will be upgrading and having compatibility issues in consoles just like we do on PC's. Blue Screens of Death, application errors, DLL incompatibility, etc, will become normal on consoles."
Much misunderstanding about what the HD of the XB will be used for. First, it doesn't install games in the sense that a PC does. It spools the DVD info onto the HD for reduced access times. When you plop in the game it loads the data that is needed first into system RAM and then keeps loading the game data onto the HD. It is built to be used as one giant @ss swap file instead of forcing the "level" mentality that consoles have been restricted by. You won't need to stop the game to load the next track, or next board, it has already been loaded off of the DVD onto the HD. This makes lots of sense, and explains the reason for the size of the drive(fits just about one entire DD DVD side).
DLL incompatibility? Win2K won't allow an overwrite anyway, X-Box certainly won't. Application errors? On locked hardware for a console? That would assume that MS won't have the standards set in place that every consol maker has, extensive testing to prove the game is bug free. BSODs? What do they look like in Win2K? Any suggestions on how to create a situation to see one in person? And even then you are assuming that a locked hardware configuration is going to suffer from the same problems as an extremely open one.
In terms of compatibility "issues", MS is hands down the best in the business. No other OS can come close to claiming that they work with nearly as much. Not Linux, not Irix, not Be, no BSD or Unix build, and not the MacOS. Many of the problems with the MS OSs, and particularly Win9X is because of the methods employed to maintain this compatibility. X-Box has none of these concerns.
Do you think that the people that work at MS are stupid? For hardware this seems to be almost entirely designed by nVidia, I trust them to deliver. For software all they need supply is a functional OS and great development tools, the latter they have already done, the former I think they can pull off. Sony, Nintendo and Sega all started out new in this arena at one point in time, and all of them managed to pull it off being complete rookies. MS seems far too serious to not make this work. They may give up overhead for the OS, but they have power to spare.
BTW- The divide by zero Navy error, that's an old one