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Microsoft merges Zune software, Xbox teams

updated 09:25 pm EST, Fri January 22, 2010

MS group merges Media Center, Xbox, Zune


Microsoft today acknowledged it has undertaken a major shift in its Entertainment and Devices group. Following the departure of corporate VP Enrico Rodriguez, the company is merging Windows Media Center and Zune software groups into the same Interactive Entertainment Business group that handles the Xbox as well as all gaming. The Mediaroom service for IPTV is also becoming a separate group within the Entertainment and Devices section.

Responding to an early leak of the reorganization, a Microsoft representative has confirmed the changes to ZDNet and characterized them as part of a "natural evolution" of the interactive group.

The Redmond, Washington developer has in recent months been showing stronger signs of consolidation that would be enhanced by the merger. Most of this has been evidenced in the porting of the Zune Video Marketplace to the Xbox but should also include Windows Mobile as soon as next month. Microsoft has acknowledged that it plans to integrate Zune elements into Windows Mobile in the long term, but the most recent rumors would have it merge Xbox and Zune into Windows Mobile 7 and finally unify all its media efforts into a single platform.

Microsoft's previous organizational structure has at times been directly cited as a key cause for much of the company's struggle to compete in the handheld and media spaces. Video from the Zune Marketplace can't be ported between the Xbox and Zune, while the absence of integration between the Zune and Windows Mobile prevents the Zune HD from using the Windows Mobile app platform and thus leaves it struggling to match some features of device like the iPod touch. Similarly, the absence of Zune design features in Windows Mobile 6.5, such as capacitive multi-touch, has cost it share versus more recent platforms like Android or iPhone that have had such features for one, two or more years.


By Electronista Staff

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iPhone, industry, gaming, software, Zune, Microsoft, Xbox, Windows Mobile, Android, mobile phones, Mediaroom

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Previous Comments

  1. Foe Hammer

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Feb 2005

    +13
    01/22, 09:45pm | report spam | (1 reply) | reply

    That's All We Need

    Brown Xboxes.


  1. Paul Huang

    Dedicated MacNNer

    Joined: Sep 1999

    +9
    01/22, 09:54pm | report spam | reply

    easier to hide the loss

    shut it down already. Maybe we need to bring out Michael to say this for the record.


  1. iphonerulez

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Nov 2008

    +8
    01/22, 10:31pm | report spam | reply

    Microsoft is building a patchwork quilt...

    Nice try. It seems to me that they're trying to copy Apple's ecosystem. Too bad Microsoft didn't look far enough into the future when they built those products. I suppose it would only take a couple of years for Microsoft to catch up to Apple on the mobile platform but Apple keeps dropping more pieces into their overall ecosystem puzzle. I can't imagine Microsoft being able to put anything together like iTMS in a short amount of time.


  1. JeffHarris

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Oct 1999

    +15
    01/22, 11:07pm | report spam | reply

    Another stab in the dark...

    The Microsoft strategy, if you want to call it that, has always been to try to gain control of every potential market, whatever the cost. They'll jump into seemingly any and every market believing that by acquiring enough companies, they'll somehow gain control. If that fails, they simply throw cash at the problem, thinking that that will be the solution, whether or not they have any expertise in the area or if it fits in with their other products, or whether or not it makes any sense to do so, it simply doesn't matter. It's all about control.

    The problem is that they've never had any kind of underlying, unifying, architectural, structural strategy to hold it all together. The whole thing is knee-jerk, scattershot and pure idiocy.

    We're seeing Microsoft crumble in slow motion, as one failure after another piles up on top of other failures. Splicing together two cash sucking projects like XBox and Zune, in the hope of somehow saving them both, is pathetically hilarious.

    I've always wanted to see Microsoft crash and burn. Given their history they deserve it, but this is like the hackneyed plot of an old western... a desperado tries to cross the desert to escape a posse. He runs out of water. The horse dies. He carries, then drops, his saddle, his rifle, the saddlebags filled with gold, then collapses deliriously and dies of thirst. There's nothing even remotely heroic in it.

    Does anyone really care about thieves, pirates and mercenaries?


  1. Feathers

    Grizzled Veteran

    Joined: Oct 1999

    +11
    01/22, 11:13pm | report spam | reply

    The Apple Core

    The core of Apple is OSX that, in different flavours, powers Macs, iPods, iPhones and AppleTVs. It is the one ring that rules them all. Microsoft can't compete with this paradigm unless they start with a clean sheet of paper like Apple did when they ditched MacOS 9.2 and moved to OSX. That will never happen. Legacy's a b*tch!


  1. Haywire

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Nov 2001

    +4
    01/22, 11:47pm | report spam | reply

    Viola!

    Microsoft is beginning to see the magic of OSX!

    Unfortunately, by the time they can make anything useful of their reorg., the Apple tablet will have run away with their gaming market also.


  1. Paul Huang

    Dedicated MacNNer

    Joined: Sep 1999

    +3
    01/22, 11:52pm | report spam | (1 reply) | reply

    bad interface is on Gates' personal site also

    http://www.gatesnotes.com/

    Click on the 'view by topic' 'button' and you will see Windows's 'start' button all over again.


  1. phillymjs

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Jun 2000

    +10
    01/23, 12:23am | report spam | reply

    JeffHarris' post nailed it.

    Microsoft basically has corporate ADHD. They see a company do something cool, they have to do something just like it, or buy them out-- whether or not that product/service fits in with their overall strategy (Do they even HAVE one of those, anymore? It's hard to tell sometimes.).

    Their only saving grace is that Windows and Office still brings in enough money that they can piss it away on all these boondoggles and still stay in business.


  1. SockRolid

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Jan 2010

    +10
    01/23, 01:54am | report spam | (1 reply) | reply

    Exactly, JeffHarris

    "The problem is that they've never had any kind of underlying, unifying, architectural, structural strategy to hold it all together. The whole thing is knee-jerk, scattershot and pure idiocy."

    That's right. But since Windows 95, Microsoft hasn't really needed to be any good at software design or development. They gained control of the market with brutally unethical tactics (remember IBM and OS/2?), and became the default OS on PCs. Call it a Windows tax if you like.

    So they've never really needed to compete on their products' merits alone. An entire generation of Microsofties has come and gone and baked the "we only need to be just barely good enough" mentality into Microsoft's corporate culture. I think it's too late to un-bake that particular cake. And the burden of backward compatibility with the 92% of the market they control guarantees that they will remain a last-century company.

    Anyway, back to the "scattershot and pure idiocy" you mentioned. When word of an imminent multi-touch mouse from Apple got out, Microsoft barfed up a FUD hairball featuring all the different, hopelessly unusable touch-sensitive mouse prototypes they had been noodling with. Get a load of this Engadget story: http://bit.ly/2Yxxjs

    And that's just something relatively simple. A mouse. But cross-platform operating systems? Heterogeneous, transparent interoperability between multiple hardware designs? Forget it. I think the reorganization is being done as an attempt to calm down angry shareholders screaming "Do something! Anything!" Pathetic.


  1. spyintheskyuk

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Nov 2009

    +7
    01/23, 08:49am | report spam | reply

    Core thinking

    Very perceptive comments. You can clearly see the big difference between a company that is planning ahead and doing so with a unified infrastructure with core technologies from which it all springs in logical fashion and one that simply reacts to what others do and try to fiddle whatever technology is handy that can quickest give some semblance of what they see, but at the cost of any unified technical or organisational thinking. However its foolish to imagine that you can get vision from a salesman so they will never compete on technology and the days when they can smother others technology are rapidly declining.


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