But let’s not open the champagne bottles yet.

The first, obvious, gargantuan, monstrous, scandalous thing about Flight is the omission of the word “simulator”. I immediately contacted Microsoft about this, and a spokesperson came back to me with this frightening answer:

With “Microsoft Flight” we’re approaching the flight simulation genre from the ground up, with the focus on the universal appeal of the experience of Flight. We believe the simplicity of “Microsoft Flight” perfectly captures that vision while welcoming the millions of existing Flight Simulator fans.

I know, dear sim fans, I know. What our virtual world needs is endless tweaking and optimizing, not a ground-up redesign. On the other hand, a dumbed down product designed to appeal to the trigger-happy halo-playing masses isn’t a simulator, so kudos to Microsoft for being honest about it and naming it right.

But is all hope really lost? A decisive factor when it comes to games is who is building them, obviously. Some games rely entirely on one man, like X-Plane, Flight Simulator’s main rival, which was built from the ground up by a genius called Austin Meyer.

In flight simulator’s case, it was a group of people called ACES studio. It’s precisely this studio which was let off a few years ago. When asked if former ACES members were behind Microsoft Flight, I was told by Microsoft that

Microsoft Flight is being developed internally at Microsoft by a team that includes many of the same creative minds that helped deliver countless entries in the Flight Simulator franchise.

This is good news, but I wasn’t completely convinced yet. Will I finally give up on my FS9 installation? One decisive factor will be realism. In this area, X-Plane will be hard to beat, because it uses something called blade element theory, rather than a physics engine based on static tables. In other words, it’s the physical features of an aircraft that will determine its performance, just like in real life. I asked Microsoft if they planned on implementing a new model, and here is what they replied:

We aren’t ready to share a specific development details at this time, but I assure you this game is very real.

Of course, the game is real, but will it feel real? Only time will tell. I wouldn’t expect a release before christmas of 2011, but we look forward to X-Plane 10 in the meantime.

Here is the official trailer:

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]]> http://techhaze.com/2010/08/microsoft-flight-what-to-expect/feed/ 3 http://techhaze.com/2010/02/microsofts-creative-destruction/ http://techhaze.com/2010/02/microsofts-creative-destruction/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:26:54 +0000 Calixte Pictet http://techhaze.com/?p=1950 An Op-Ed by Dick Brass–a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004–was published in the New York Times four days ago. In the article entitled “Microsoft’s Creative Destruction,” Mr. Brass gives his opinion on Microsoft’s future. You’ve guessed it: it’s not bright. He also explains why Microsoft seems to consistantly fail to innovate. It’s a must read, but another article was written that same day.

It’s a blog post on Microsoft’s official blog (Oooooh!) written by Microsoft’s very own president of communications (or something like that), Frank Shaw. It is a direct answer to D. Brass’ article, and attacks a few arguments that Mr. Brass pointed out, primarily that the corporate response to ClearType technology is not what Brass says it was and that the Xbox was and is the best and most innovative game console out there. But what his blog post doesn’t do is answer to the most important problem Dick Brass underlined: corporate culture. According to Dick, Microsoft’s real problem is infighting, projects competing for financing and attention instead of working together to create a great product. This may be the difference between Microsoft and companies like Apple.

Microsoft has had its share of criticism for a while now. Windows is still perceived as a copy-cat operating system, and will still be for a while, no matter what Microsoft does to change that image. However, this situation was not a problem ten years ago because Windows had no true mainstream competitor. Now, its desktop OS market is wounded by Apple’s fast rise, Linux is well established in the server business, IE is taking a hit and even its office suite is feeling the competition’s weight. Microsoft is a company that likes to fight on all fronts, but it seems that it stays a minor players in every market where it doesn’t have a historical advance, and even these seem unstable.

As I see it, Microsoft is not completely lagging behind. It’s still a powerful tech company that innovates and releases good products. However, it rarely is the best at anything, and when it is, commercial success is not guaranteed. Redmond is still capable of releasing great products, but it doesn’t have the same responsiveness as other companies such as Apple and Google. Is that due to a bad corporate culture and constant infighting? I do not work at Microsoft, and I never did, but I strongly invite you to read both the original Op-Ed in the New York Times and Microsoft’s answer. You tell me: do you believe the 93 000 employee-strong company still innovating?

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Google and Apple are competing in increasingly overlapping markets, and the more they compete, the less likely they are to be friends. It turns out that the two companies are much more alike now than they were a few years ago. While Google’s original and core service (Internet search) is not in direct competition with Apple, Google will join the personal computer market soon with their Chrome OS.

But Apple and Google have been competing for quite some time in the smartphone market, where Google’s Android operating system ran on several phones, weakly competing against the almighty iPhone. Weak competition, but competition nonetheless, and clearly a force to be reckoned with. It exploded a first time when Apple refused an iPhone app from Google called Google voice. After loud chest-drumming from both sides, Eric Schmidt (Google’s chief executive) was forced to resign from Apple’s board.

Competition between the two companies became clearer recently as Google launched the Nexus One, their own home-branded phone. It may not be the iPhone killer (if one ever appears) but it is probably the first phone to actually compete with the iPhone that you can trust on the long-run.

There are talks about Apple dropping Google as Safari’s default search engine and going for Bing, Microsoft’s solution. According to me, that’s where it gets interesting. In the last years, with the advent of Google and the resurrection of Apple, Microsoft had decided to fight on all fronts and to compete openly against both companies on all domains. Both Google and Apple were tied together by the fight against that common enemy. As one of the two looks at it’s old friend, it realizes that it is becoming too powerful… and searches an alliance with its old arch-enemy! Could Google be as dangerous as Microsoft for Apple?

Nick Bilton from the New York Times provided us with an interesting table showing where each of these three companies (as well as Yahoo!) stand.

Let’s forget Yahoo!, it’s only a small player and it’s not going to be near where the real big business is anytime soon¹. For most people, it will not be surprizing to see that Microsoft is everywhere. The only market they haven’t joined is “mobile hardware”, and that’s just becuse they don’t want to offend their partners. What is more surprising is that Google has become a direct competitor to both Redmond and Cupertino in almost all markets, and though it may not be up for size in some domains, it beats them in others. However, the three firms are still radically different:

Apple sells solid. It is a hardware and software company that likes to control everything so as to deliver quality products that are consistent and interoperable. The power of the Mac and the iPhone are brought by Steve Jobs and Co’s grips on the design and production processes. Apple sells simple, trendy, quality products.

Microsoft originated in a completely virtual world. They appeared as a software company and have grown out of it only partially. The Windows franchise is still their flagship product. Steve Balmer likes to be everywhere and do everything he can to crush every possible competitor, but the main difference between his strategy and Apple’s is his relationship with partners.

Google, on the other hand, is an Internet company. They have lived, grown and thrived in the SaaS² business first providing search (which is still what they are most known for) and gradually creating new services that have transformed the way we do things (like Gmail). They have flourished by giving out free “Software as a Service”, and with a new business model has appeared new ways of thinking. However, the SaaS and freebie models are still newcomers, and apparently too small and fragile for Mountain View. And that’s how it became the third bully on the block. It was David and Goliath a few years back, now it resembles the Titans against the Olympians.

Three way competition is more than interesting as we will see the cooperation-competition relations evolve. Google can’t survive without Windows and Mac OS as Chrome OS will not be getting interesting marketshare anytime soon. Google is still primarily a search engine and advertiser because that’s where its revenue comes from. Microsoft and Apple–as companies that like to keep things under control–cannot like the way Google is evolving, but neither can they like each other.

We would like to forget that in these situations, it’s still pragmatism that wins. Companies are playing the money of their investors, and all these ones want is cash. But as Google invests more into their traditional territories the game will get ever more complex. Is there enough space for three big players to survive?

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¹ Not that Yahoo! is small, but they’re not the ones making the rules any longer.
² SaaS stands for Software as a Service