whr4usa

July 26, 2012 at 1:35pm

Microsoft is a technology business not a gaming company, though they do publish or develop a handful of titles which is why their platforms, services & products continue to do well because unlike other corporations they force their business units to use one another's creations and self-critique their organization as a whole

if any business fails to gain or maintain marketshare, sales, profits, mindshare, revenues et al. then they cease to exist, this doesn't make them wrong, evil or anticonsumer just good businesses catering to uninformed customers

as far as your 'evidence' goes the only reason XP 64 didn't play well with games, puns intended ...was because most games for technical, historical & economical reasons were still using 16-bit engines, libraries, installers or/and other components which obviously can't run on any 64-bit OS without another layer of complexity i.e. WOW32 within WOW64 or some sort of "hosted hypervisor" application
(i.e. Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7)
also the reason XP 64-bit wasn't more widely available was because of a lack of new 64-bit native drivers for critical components as well as a lack of a proper 32-bit or 64-bit pre-boot environment (XP still relied upon DOS) and because many device manufacturers like the game developers wern't writing proper [driver] code to begin with - hence the 4GB physical memory addressing limit being imposed upon the NT VMM in 32-bit Windows for compatability and stability reasons
. . . I'm unsure what's making you cite DirectX10 as a negative..? Vista wasn't even a negative for gaming except we're only just now beginning to see developers embrace the 'baseline' made possible by Vista's enhancements
(i.e. BF3 has no XP support, rightly so & DICE is considering true 64-bit-only Windows games, finally!)
there were several nonstandard or proprietary and third-party audiop pipelines discontinued or blocked by the new driver model in vista or the new multimedia system initially but most of that was laziness on the pat of device manufacturers not provided drivers compatible with the new model
FYI Vista SP2 does have DirectX11 assuming you actually install Windows Updates like you should!
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971644
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=4390
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=3274
assuming by "net frame" you're referring to the Microsoft .NET Framework, what do you think it has to do with gaming..?
...and there are still going to be retailed FPP [Fully Packaged Products] for Windows 8, they'll just only be "Upgrade Licenses" instead of also having transferable\standalone licenses which makes it simpler, cheaper, better for everybody, is that really a negative for gaming..?

it wouldn't surprise me if the XBox360 is the last major 'console' out of Microsoft hardware with things like OnLive possible and the XBox Live integration in Windows 8, the VDI/RDS capabilities in WOA\Windows RT and the protability of IE10 amongst many other points

Steam is the Apple of digital distribution . . . I recognize their success, innovation and for forging head bringing digital distribution mainstream even first-class but compared to Good Old Games, Origin & especially StarDock's Impulse platform
(...now GameStop PC App)
there's no comparison from a technical perspective