I was watching the J. Allard Interview from E3-2004 and he said a lot about the future of the gaming industry, as seen by Microsoft. He had a lot of great ideas, but the first time I watched it 8 months ago, I didn't pick up on the fact that it was very cleverly veiled marketing propaganda. He was "predicting the future", and everything he said was accurate, but the way in which his predicted future was implemented was cleverly tweaked so that Microsoft would be an integrated part of it. Instead of saying "this is what Microsoft wants to happen", he says, "this is the way things will be", and rationalizes it with an explanation of how it's better than the current market. For example, the console market is currently (and has been for a long time) a format war, like VHS vs. Beta. You can't just buy a game and play it on whatever console you want -- you have to buy the console that will work with your games, just like you had to buy a VCR that worked with the right format. And he's right -- it is bad for the industry. What he sneakily does is suggest that you need Microsoft as that standard. He's totally right in everything he says except that. He also mentioned the way that, before DOS, hardware was specifically designed for software and vice versa, and when DOS came around, it acted as an abstraction layer so that people could write their programs in one way, and have it run on any hardware. And he points out that there was a huge boom in the industry when a standard was reached, because now people could choose their hardware platforms, and there could be competition, and prices went down, etc., but again, he leads you to believe that Microsoft was the reason this all happened.

It's true, Microsoft was the standard that people were using during the boom, but they didn't invent that standard. In fact, they viciously stole it! They reverse-engineered the current industry standard, CP/M, because the author wouldn't sell out to them. It was identical to DOS. The history of the creation of Microsoft DOS is quite interesting.

I believe that any standard, when it acts like an axis so that consumers can pick between different competing products, is a huge boon. But, when that axis is proprietary, it's restricted by a single company. For this reason, I think that the axis should be publically controlled and influenced by all who are taking advantage of it. A great example of a stable open-standard is OpenGL. It's not controlled by a single company, which means that it can't be exploited and used to leverage the market to benefit that one company over others. It's controlled by the market itself -- the board of directors who make the decisions on the next version of OpenGL are representatives from all the different video card and game companies. It's resulted in a brilliantly stable and high-quality piece of software. OpenGL was running circles around DirectX until Microsoft copied it almost exactly, and then used brute force to leverage DirectX over OpenGL (by offering special things to game companies and video card companies, using it in the XBOX, etc.).

I strongly believe that standards should be public property, or at least shared amongst the interested parties. Creating open source standards is even more powerful -- in the case of operating systems, this would've made a huge impact on the computer industry. Open source standards are much more adaptable to customer and manufactuer preferences than proprietary ones, because the customer and manufacturer can change them directly! Nobody needs to go through the bureaucracy of a huge company like Microsoft.