Recently we have seen several articles stating that 2008 will be “The Year of the PS3″. Every must have game for the PS3 for 2007 that got pushed back into 2008 is finally due for release. Pile on some must have non-exclusive titles and quite a few possible sleepers, and it’s pretty hard to dispute this fact. Microsoft knows this better than anyone. Microsoft has submitted press release after interview in response to both the PS3’s NPD figures over the last two months and the new 2008 catch phrase “Year of the PS3″. Press releases like these are clearly statements of “Buy us Please!”

When I first began researching this article I wanted to find the exact time that Microsoft lost it’s grip on the industry. So I started moving backwards through time looking at article after article for that one moment where Microsoft went from doing everything right to ummm…what’s the new hippster slang? Ah, yes. Slippin’. What I found is that they’ve been “slippin’” since right after launch.

While everyone was hypnotized by the billion dollar hype machine, a few in the back started noticing some problems. Developers were stating that they wished the 360 included a HDD or HD disk as they were already hitting up against the DVD capacity limit. Microsoft respond to such criticism with the all to familiar “We give Xbox users the choice of what type of experience they chose to have with our product.” Not a direct quote but close enough. Today these complaints still go on but there is very little Microsoft can do about it at this point.

Shortly after began the complaints about not inlcuding HD-DVD. This came from both the developers and the HD-DVD alliance, or whatever they were called. Justice League? Anyway the developers were complaining about the lack of HD-DVD in the 360 for the same reason as the lack of HDD. Capacity. The developers thought that Microsoft should have included at least one of those features for capacities sake. The HD-DVD camp saw the writing on the wall with the PS3 (or should have), and was pushing Microsoft for some sort of response. They got the HD-DVD add-on. But then Microsoft ran into another problem., no HDMI. Microsoft for the longest time stated that it didn’t need HDMI to deliver HD content. This is correct you don’t need it to deliver, computers have been doing it for years sans HDMI. However delivery was not what the concern was.

Without HDMI there was no hardware DRM for HD content. No HDMI combined with HD-DVD would have made the HD pirates wet dreams come true. Had Microsoft been able to some how get away with full resolution without HDMI the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray war might have turned out very different. Once it was seen that the HD-DVD add-on would not do for HD-DVD (no one must have been paying attention to history) what the PS3 did for Blu-ray, microsoft issued more statments.

These statements came about during the end of the format war. Microsoft stated that a HD physical medium was not needed simply because downloading to HDD was the future. This stuck for a couple of months. Once people began to do some basic math, realising that they would need a couple hundred terabytes to store their movies, plus download time, and HDD costs it simply wasn’t worth it. Download only content may be the future but it’s not going to be a near future solution.

It’s game selection also suffers. The 360 has a library largely consisting of Racing and FPS/TPS. While there are some good titles in those genres there’s very little of anything note worthy in other genres for the Xbox 360.Even Xbox live has come under fire for costing extra money. Sure it’s leaps and bounds better than the free Sony solution, but it’s crippled compared to the PC, which is also free.Recent price drops have been put into play to try and help the 360 outside of the U.S. where it has largely failed.Let’s also not forget the billion dollar warranty extension.

After all my research I’ve found out that despite the hype the 360 only had a couple of things going for it and you can’t even attribute all of them to Microsoft. Namely a year head start, Sony’s stumble out of the gate, and XNA. XNA is the one thing responsible for the 360 having titles outside Racing and FPS.This isn’t to say that the Xbox is an utter failure and that some other console is the second coming. Both of the other consoles have some serious flaws. What I’m stating is that the Xbox 360’s biggest flaw was that Microsoft tried to use OS marketing tactics when launching it. Figuring they could over come the hardware problems and corner the market through billion dollar marketing machine and a head start. Maybe next time Microsoft will focus on building a console instead of selling one.