To be fair, he then goes on to [clarify] a few lines after:
Dunno if people are deliberately missing that.
The defensiveness in this thread (including the majority of posters assuming it was
personally directed at them, or that owning a device eliminates the possibility of their reacting irrationally) gives credence to what he's saying. Preemptively crying out for the failure of a platform is pretty odd no matter what company makes it. If the device is truly anti-consumer, then consumers won't be interested in it, and certainly not long term. I got bent out of shape when I saw people saying the PS3 was rubbish in its first year because it wasn't optimized and there weren't a lot of games, but I also trusted that if it was as good as I gave it credit for being, it would do fine long-term. That absolutely ended up being the case. I look at it the same way here: if the XB1 really does have a cruddy ownership proposition for consumers, after the initial rush, people will react to those problems in their purchases. I'm comfortable with that dynamic. It's clear many people here aren't, at least as far as the XB1 is concerned.
What I see here is a substantial number of voices in this community not trusting other consumers to make the purchase choices they
want them to make (which is crazy in its own way), so they shout
louder and try all the harder to
proselytize against something instead of actually rallying
for something. Again, it's not merely reacting to rumors, or considering rumors. It's enthusiasm
for negative rumors, in a way that distorts the overall image of what's actually happening. That's not to say there's not issues with the proposition of the XB1. There's a reason I have no plans to purchase one, but I'm not personally attacking anyone who
dares point out the possibility that we need more info on it, or who
dares not call it the "xbone," or
dares point out that certain rumors like the down-clock aren't really solid yet. The fact that there's a thread with this much attention on it because
yields of a component are lower than they want them to be again proves Brad's point has merit. Almost every mainstream tech product faces a similar production inefficiencies. Look at this thread compared to the reaction in those cases. This is
bile.
As I said before, when the audience reaches the point where they assume any positive statement by the company can't be trusted at all, things have reached a fever-pitch. When that reaches the point where people are attacking the people carrying those messages on a personal level, things have done too far. I'm not saying "assume PR is always good," but if you categorically won't accept info from the only primary source we have on the record for it, it's hard not to see that as baseless denial, because people don't
want it to be true.
! I forgot Star Office and Open Office too! And iWork, but that falls in the bucket of a company having the audacity to charge for a product.
