The Microsoft Unified Communication Team a nice insight to the interconnection between the Windows Live Messenger platform and XBOX Live. May 7 this will go live … I like the figures as well : 260M Windows Live users and 6M XBOX Live users …
One of the things I really love about what we do a Microsoft is that sometimes we like to ‘break the rules’, not in the sense that we do something we shouldn’t, more that we do things that should have been done a long time ago.
One of the more recent examples of this is Shadowrun, a game that you can play online across PC and XBOX … cross platform … how cool is that!
Well, the boys and girls at XBOX Live and Windows Live Messenger have teamed up to announce a connection between the 260 million Windows Live Messenger users to the 6 million XBOX Live users.
This means from May 7th, gamers will be able to chat with their friends no matter whether they are on the XBOX 360 or Windows Live Messenger…. this truly is another example of us ‘breaking the rules’ and connecting two great communities together …. lets hope they add voice and video soon after!
For more detail on the above announcement as well as other details on what will be released on the 7th, pop along to the press release.
Craig,
Ofcourse there are different meanings to the word platfrom. WIthin Microsoft XBOX and for example Windows Live are referred to as platforms.
They are used by different communities.
Ny the way there is also cross platform for example the conectivity between Microsoft Live Communications Server, MSN , Yahoo and AOL for some 1,5 years now. You see you can have it any way you want 😉
Pride ? I am very proud of the fact that Microsoft has been able to build these communities and continues to find new ways of leveraging the different business models and solutions to create new ones.
Remember the days that all the “real” Software vendors laught at Microsoft for having a consumer stretgy and solutions lik the XBOX ? ” Would you buy an enterprise solution from a company that builds and seel gameconsoles”
Well toda this game console was instrumental in creating quite a arge VOIP network with over 6M users 😉
We realllly need to stop referring to things that run across different M$ OSes as ‘cross-platform’. It isn’t, because all those are owned & controlled by the same vendor. It ought to be really easy to do that, and you shouldn’t be proud of something so trivial.