Microsoft Set to Debut Xbox Live Upgrade  
Mon May 5, 2003 04:59 PM ET  
By Reed Stevenson and Ben Berkowitz
SEATTLE/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O is aiming to raise the stakes in the $30 billion global video game industry and strengthen its foothold in living rooms with major changes to its Xbox Live online gaming service, industry sources said on Monday.
 
As game makers prepare for the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, the year's largest video game show, Microsoft is readying a new version of Xbox Live with advanced community features such as voice chat and locater services that operate independently of games in progress, said sources with knowledge of the software company's plans.
 
While a Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the upcoming upgrade, he did say the company was planning "groundbreaking announcements" at E3.
 
"Microsoft is continually innovating the Xbox platform. It is the only console which allows for continual upgrades and game play experience enhancements," the spokesman said.
 
While Xbox Live subscribers can chat with each other using an Xbox Communicator headset and broadband links, communicating requires players to be inside a game.
 
After the upgrades, the sources said, players will be able to turn on their Xboxes, see who among their friends is online, and engage them in voice chats in community settings that do not even require a game to be inside the console.
 
Other add-ons coming soon to the console include the ability to use the Xbox as a sort of media center, to listen to digital music and watch videos in their living rooms.
 
"What Microsoft is doing with Xbox is trying to extend the shelf life of the console," said Matt Rostoff, an analyst at independent research firm Directions on Microsoft. "The traditional shelf life is 18 months -- the way to extend that is to actually change and add functionality through additional software that can be delivered over the wire."
 
The Xbox, first released in the United States in November 2001, has established itself firmly in the No. 2 spot in the American and European markets but is still dwarfed by Sony Corp.'s 6758.T PlayStation 2, which came out a year earlier.
 
TARGET SONY
 
All Xbox consoles come with a hard drive and a high-speed Web access port, which unlike the PlayStation, allows Microsoft to deliver software upgrades to the Xbox without having to launch a new console.
 
Both players are the same price. However, Sony's strong games lineup and a large installed base are attractive to game developers, making it difficult for Xbox to compete.
 
"They can't compete with Sony in terms of some of the exclusives they're getting, and they can't compete with the installed base out there," Dan "Shoe" Hsu, the editor of gaming magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, told Reuters recently.
 
While the software upgrade would help extend the life of the console, Microsoft also made it clear recently that it will bring out a next-generation console in the future.
 
"At the appropriate time -- which I will not identify today -- we're going to bring out a second-generation of the console. We're going to continue to work hard to take market share," Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told Reuters in an interview on April 24.
 
Microsoft has long tried to extend its software beyond the office and desktops to the living room, investing billions in the cable industry until it adopted the Xbox as its best bet to put its software at the center of home entertainment.
 
The upcoming upgrade will have a new feature tentatively dubbed "Xbox Music Mixer." It allows users to pull the music files off their computers and onto the Xbox's 8-gigabyte hard drive, then use the Xbox as a media center with on-screen displays and auto-identification of songs, sources said.
 
With the new upgrade, Xbox users would also be able to transfer properly encoded video from their personal computers to the Xbox and view that video on a television screen.
 
Still, many see the console's biggest problem as a lack of strong first-party games, the type of "must-have" titles that sell hardware and generate significant profits.

Microsoft lancera les premières toilettes publiques connectées LONDRES (Reuters) - Le fournisseur d'accès internet américain MSN, filiale de Microsoft, présentera cet été pendant les différents festivals musicaux en Grande-Bretagne les premières toilettes publiques connectées à internet du monde.
 
 
Les cabines, baptisées "iLoo" comprendront un clavier sans fil, un écran plat et une connexion internet.
 
 
"L'internet est devenu tellement partie intégrante de la vie quotidienne que naviguer pendant qu'on est sur le trône était logiquement l'étape suivante", a déclaré Tracy Blacher, directrice marketing de MSN.
 
 
Le mot "loo" désigne les cabinets, en langue anglaise.
 
 
MSN avait déjà installé en 2001 le premier banc public connecté à internet dans la ville de Suffolk, dans le sud-est de l'Angleterre.