June 16 at 8:40 pm
- Link
"Let me first say that I'm very biased here because (a) I worked for Microsoft from '91-'97, and (b) I led Microsoft's Internet Gaming Group during my last two years. With that out of the way, let me just offer a few thoughts. First, Microsoft's "Arena" project detailed out avatars like this back in '95, when we first launched our own web-based gaming network (which was, by the way, one of the very first gaming networks on the world wide web). Mii's are cool but do you also criticize Nintendo for motion-sense controllers? Those have been out for quite a while as well, as has online gaming. The point is we ALL stand on the shoulders of giants. Ever use AJAX in a website? (If you use Digg, you do.) It requires a little something called XmlHttpRequest, which came from Microsoft and first made its appearance in Internet Explorer. Ever use Microsoft Access? It was the first fully relational PC database in a major windowing system. (Not Borland, not Ashton Tate.) Ever use Autosum in Excel?..." - Steve Murch