Yeah I knew that, but the question here is: where does SEGA ends and Sammy begins? BTW, while keeping the DC alive for an extra year or more could've proven to be a good idea, the odds are that in case of a buyout by MS the only assets that would be used from SEGA would be their studios and valuable trademarks and franchises. The rest would probably get discarded...
There's also the consideration of such a large Japanese company being controlled by (foreign) American capital. I think there are special provisions preventing that in Japanese law and giving Japanese bidders and edge.
I did read a essay or two on the matter, but they were from the 80s and seeing the number of japanese companies like Mazda and others with most of their stock in foreign hands I tought that law was removed and/or obsolete. Anyway, I just wanted to make a point guys, and that is that MS could've had a hell of a better (and cheaper) performance in the console market if they used SEGA instead of trying to find their own way into this mess. Is ironic but for every awesome idea they had, they made an equally abysmal decision to go with it. Take the Xbox: Live! is great, a true evolution of the SegaNet with its own original ideas, but using off-the-shelf PC parts to do it was just stupid. I cant believe nobody in the division (or the whole corporation) tought that Intel and nVidia would somehow take advantage of the situation (and charge a fortune for the components like they did). Then theres the X360: the designers were brilliant and the CPU/GPU combination they choose back in the day were among the best available, but how they managed to screw everything up with such a poor thermal design is beyond me... SEGA on the other hand came with an almost perfect console (almost becos it could've had a DVD instead of GD, and I didnt like that they crippled the GPU) that didnt had any of these issues. The problem? they just run out of money, to the point that CSK CEO gave SEGA $40 millions of his own pocket to keep the dream alive. MS on the other hand had to keep feeding the Xbox with money for its entire lifespan, burning through an estimate of $4 billions, almost double the total cost of SEGA at the end of the DC. What can I say? Irony is a bitch...
of course they knew. the price of the components was fixed for the perpetuety of their contract. They knew what they got into - they were hoping for better results maybe. Then again, they knew that they had a brand to establish and the most powerful components for them were only offered in-time from off-the-shelf objects. This is one of the reasons that they *killed* the XBOX as soon as they possibly could to release the 360.
Regardless of that, they could've used other components. For example, the Athlon, which was way more powerful than the celeron, and since AMD was into some trouble at the time they could've arranged a more flexible contract, or even get a license to make the chip themselves like they do now. The same with nVidia, plus ATI offerings were up to the challenge (reason why MS must have decided to go that way with the X360). And in my opinion killing the Xbox was damage control and nothing else...
I thought they were going to use Athlon and Ati at first? I think that was in that opening the Xbox book. Also, MS might be burning money with Xbox, but there still doing a good job, and usually there stuff has been in the best interest of the players, like free repairs on RROD. A better idea would be not having RROD, but still.
The decision to change from AMD to Intel casued a major issue with Xbox security later on. Look for the video explaining the Xbox's security system on Google Video, or it's here somewhere as well (maybe in the Xbox dev forum).
We're talking business, not charity. Selling a subsidized product (like the Xbox) is great for the buyer but awful for the company's numbers. And as you said, it would be better if there wasnt RLODs at all... Yeah I saw that video a while ago, very interesting since it shows you (in my opinion) the actual professionalism of the hardware dev team:110: