SmartGlass and Media at the Heart of the New Xbox
May 21st is shaping up to be an important day for gamers despite the very real concerns seemingly justified by the extended weather forecast obtained from the met; the wabe may end up flooded for all or part of the morning on 21 May 2013 but not due to rain, but due to the embarrassed weeping of members of the Fourth Estate.
The significance of May 21st is that it is widely anticipated to be the morning of the day on which Microsoft (MSFT) will be holding the first official press conference to reveal to consumers details of its upcoming new Xbox video game and multimedia console.
When we portray this as the first official reveal to consumers that makes allowances for the fact that the company will, on Monday 10 June 2013 at 0930 PT (GMT-8), undertake a more complete and intense unveiling to the press at what is generally considered to be its official First Event at E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo.
In spite of the rampant speculation, and instant opinions that spring from armchair experts almost on command, the members of the Fourth Estate whose beat is ostensibly Tech and to a lesser extent Gaming will generate a lot of guess work; most of which will turn out to be just plain wrong while a lot will turn out to be right too.
Perhaps it really does help to own or at least possess (even if just temporarily) a lucky silver coin of the sort usually referred to as a “Peace Dollar” that rumor has it decided the question of who got to be the President of Microsoft (Bill Gates or Paul Allen) settled in the dusty parking lot of a tavern just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico on 25 November, 1975.
I don’t have a crystal ball - and if I had a Peace Dollar I would probably sell it because the economy being what it is, and the spot value of Silver this morning proving its worth at almost $30 - what I did instead was to harvest the many and varied predictions of others from the world wide web with an eye towards picking the most likely five of them that will probably be true:
The new Xbox will arrive in stores for the Xmas 2013 Season, but there will be shortages;
The new Xbox will help Microsoft eventually steer game studios towards a digital distribution standard for consoles but it will not happen overnight;
Microsoft is serious about re-positioning the Xbox as a living room Media Hub rather than just a game console;
Microsoft will drop the number-designator for the new Xbox and call it the New Xbox;
The new Xbox will have a large number of LIVE-based launch titles - digital launch titles in other words;
With that managed I thought I would make an observation of my own, based upon a notion that I have been kicking around in my head for the past year, though until now lacked the confidence to make it a matter of the public record, or make it my own personal stand…
The idea that Microsoft will be unveiling for the first time details of the new next generation Xbox is not really accurate - they revealed a major element well over a year ago, but carefully concealed that reveal by using the Xbox Kinect as a smokescreen that was designed to divert our attention away from the real reveal, which is called SmartGlass.
The reason for this massive slight-of-hand trickery on a scale never before seen has a lot to do with the direction that Microsoft is taking its console in - a direction that is finely represented by Number 3 above: “Microsoft is serious about re-positioning the Xbox as a living room Media Hub rather than just a game console” - which it is.
The rest of this article is about SmartGlass and my new understanding towards it thanks in part to a seemingly casual comment that was made by a Microsoft rep at a press event a few months ago.
I now understand that the comment was something of an inside joke; the two rep’s were standing there talking about the new direction that Microsoft was taking and a major element for the basis of its new media philosophy, right in front of members of the press, and we had not a clue how important or significant what they were saying was.
SmartGlass: A Masterful Trojan Horse of Beta Tests
When Microsoft unveiled the new software app called SmartGlass at its E3 Presser on 4 June 2012 the assembled press were given a catbird’s seat to one of the most significant product announcements to hit the games industry in a very long time: the first reveal of new tech for the next generation of the Xbox console.
Every one of the assembled games journalists completely missed the point (and I include myself in that grouping) and saw the event for what they were meant to see it as: Microsoft one-upping Nintendo by launching a free piece of software that basically accomplished the same technology wonder that Nintendo’s new Wii U screen-equipped gamepads did, but of course Microsoft did it as software, and did not spend a gazillion dollars in R&D to get there, or so it appeared.
When I say we missed the point, I mean we really missed the point of that unveil.
While it is true that some of the coverage that was generated by that event mentioned that this was likely to be an app supported by the next gen version of the Xbox - the great success that Microsoft had in convincing us that it was the Kinect that was the important bit; the Kinect that was the future of the Xbox. None of us realized that what we were actually witnessing was something else entirely.
I can only imagine how difficult it was for the new Xbox development team to keep a straight face and not give the game away when we all eagerly reported the event as a Microsoft victory over Nintendo.
I can imagine how hard it must have been to field all the questions that we asked about what devices would eventually be supported by SmartGlass, as portable screens, and as extensions of the Xbox.
We now know that the answer to that question is: All of them.
While we chortled over how embarrassing it must be over in the Nintendo tent to have Microsoft treat the literal cornerstone of their next generation console hardware innovation, their portable display technology, as something so trivial that the Xbox dev team dealt with it as an app when all along it was not about one-upping Nintendo or showing off at all.
It was not about dealing with the technological issue as an software rather than hardware equation…
What it was, in simple terms, was the launch of the first piece of next generation Xbox code as a secret Beta Test whose aim was to distribute the “SmartGlass App” as far and as wide as they could, getting it into as many mixed tech environments as they could, running on as broad a selection of hardware as they could, with the sole purpose of that exercise being to try to break it, overload it, and otherwise stress-test the hell out of it!
Why?
Because that software-based transportable screen/interface app is at the very heart of the new direction in which Microsoft is taking their game console.
The new Xbox is not supposed to be a new game console, it is supposed to be the new media hub in your home that just happens to be the best game console out there.
It also happens to be your go-to box for TV, movies, music, music videos, YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, the Interwebs in general, and entertainment in its many forms specifically!
It was no accident that the one thing that SmartGlass does not do is transport the game display for video games to any screen you choose to have it display on; SmartGlass does not do that.
But that is not to say that SmartGlass CAN not do that.
Call it a prediction, call it a guess, but I suspect that when (not if) Microsoft wants SmartGlass to be able to send the game screen elsewhere, it will.
A Massive Beta Test?
If Microsoft had simply announced that SmartGlass was part of the heart of the new Xbox, the tech and games journalists of the world have given that app its undivided attention and untold amounts of energy would have been burned in its dissection and criticism.
I know my peers, and there is absolutely no doubt that the first stage would have been the polarization of the community based upon nothing but gut feelings, and that would eventually have resulted in the bulk of the following year being spent tearing it apart in the desperate search for footholds in the cliff that is tech few of us understand even now!
That would not have prevented the offering of expert opinion about either why it was cool, or how much it sucked. How it was a great idea, or how it was a bad one. There would have been rampant speculation about how Microsoft not only stole the idea from Nintendo, but went on to use that stolen idea to drive the market in the direction it chose because hey, Microsoft is Big Corporate Brother, right?
While all of that was going on, software developers would have spent that year trying to figure out how to cash-in on Micrtosoft’s new tech innovation, speculators would have spent that year trying to figure out what other directions and tech that this new approach was likely to head in and create so that they could find ways to exploit it, even if it was just registering likely domain names that might later end up being worth real money.
A lot of other stuff would have happened, some of it maybe good, but most of it probably not good, since pretty much all of it would have gotten in the way of what Microsoft was after - the wide scale massive Beta Test of SmartGlass.
What the company needed was to announce the app, get a bunch of people excited enough to download and use it, but not to the point where they started adding the numbers up and realizing what they meant.
It needed to build it into Windows 8 as a feature, and launch versions of the SmartGlass App for as many platforms as it could before the day arrived when it was time to begin revealing the new Xbox media HQ to the world.
It needed to accomplish all of that while all the while getting the press to ignore it.
Microsoft accomplished every single one of those goals.
If you check the official SmartGlass website you will note that there are now versions of the program for the following platforms:
Android 4.x Tablet Devices;
iPad 1;
iPad 2;
iPad 3;
iPhone 3GS;
iPhone 4;
iPhone 4S;
iPod Touch 4th generation;
Windows 8 Tablets and PCs;
Windows RT Tablets and PCs;
Windows Phone 7.5;
Windows Phone 7.8
Windows Phone 8;
If you still are not satisfied, load your web browser of preference and visit this page:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/
What you see being described there is not an app that was created to show-up Nintendo; it is the focus of a multimedia entertainment system that is intended to master and integrate into its network and control every other media device you own - or are likely to own.
What you see is the literal beating heart of the new Xbox.
