Microsoft is not a software company. Their focus is not to make ‘good’ software.
Microsoft is not a service company. Their focus is not to create good customer experiences.
Microsoft is a marketing company. Marketing is the company’s soul.
On Tuesday, Microsoft is set to announce a new suite of advertising tools, called NUads, short for natural user-interface ads, that will let users interact with advertising on the console dashboard or embedded in games and other video content. The ads use the same voice and motion control developed for the company’s Kinect game console, which it introduced in time for the 2010 holiday season.
The new ads are intended to help advertisers keep the attention of Xbox users in a way that traditional television advertising does not.
“When you have highly interactive people and a passive medium, they are interacting with their phone or their laptop while watching TV,” said Mark Kroese, the general manager of the advertising business group at Microsoft. The new ads, Mr. Kroese said, “create a natural way for the user to engage with the TV.”
There is nothing ‘natural’ about marketing. Even the hardcore gamers won’t be fooled by this. Microsoft is trying to leverage a position in gaming into something that is not gaming. The purpose of gaming is not for Microsoft to experiment with new advertising methods.
This lack of respect for gamers could very well colorize Microsoft’s failure in Generation Eight (should Microsoft continue with this mindset). It is insulting to pay a subscription for Xbox Live only to have to go through these ads. The subscription fee, itself, is insulting as the PC gaming brothers laugh at the stupidity of the ‘hardcore console gamers’.
NUads? GTFO. We don’t need this garbage in our gaming. Out! Out! Out!
Here is a video of when Kinect came out…
This marketer is having orgasms over Kinect’s “potential”. Microsoft isn’t interested in gaming so much as creating ‘platforms’ where all of us are used as pawns for something else… like NUads. The ‘success’ Microsoft has had with gaming revolves around the strategy of throwing money at it. Overheating consoles? Throw money at it. PC games? Throw money at it so they are exclusive to Xbox. Throw money at analysts. Throw money at journalists. Hire failed writers to serve as ‘viral marketers’ throughout the Net. At this rate, Microsoft might as well throw money at the customer. At least, then, the customer could go buy from a company actually interested in gaming.