You'd think when you're plonking down upwards of £500/$700, the company behind the product in question would endeavour to make sure you feel comfortable and pleased with doing so. However, it seems that since day one both the Xbox hardware itself and Microsoft's responses haven't only managed to put one foot wrong, they've all but awkwardly salsa-danced themselves into an early grave. It's actually quite rare to see a company who were so far out in front in terms of public favour and mainstream opinion thanks to the 360, end up dropping the ball in such a spectacular fashion. But drop it they have, and in the past nine months since release it's been one cack-handed scrabble in the mud after another to pick it back up, with offers of a Kinect-less Xbox being the thing Microsoft thought may win them back the most public favour. If you remember the initial fallout from the reveal event and that now-infamous interview between Geoff Keighley and Xbox representative Don Mattrick, when quizzed on the necessity of upgrading to the new hardware the latter remarked "We have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity; it's called Xbox 360." Straight away things were just a little bit amiss in Camp Microsoft, and it was all downhill from there.
11. The Necessity Of The Kinect
Usually when the overall cultural opinion on something is locked in and the bandwagons are going full steam ahead, you'll still find an online contingent sporadically voicing the opposing side. Not this time though. Everyone from critics to long-time fans and even the staunchest believers in new gadgetry looked at the idea of a console that had to be controlled with your voice and went "...really!?" You can't blame Microsoft for trying to innovate and push the level of interaction we have with our media to Minority Report-levels of awesome, but what QA team or set of beta testers approved the idea in the first place? They tried and tried to tell us that the way the menus work within the system were inexplicably tied to using your voice - forcing us to get on board with the new technology - but following months of backlash there's now a version of the system that ships without the peripheral. It really doesn't create any wiggle room for reasoning either, the Xbox One straight-up functions just fine without the Kinect. Simple.
