I think Microsoft has finally figured out the gaming market and Sony has missed the boat, officially. Here’s what I mean: Engadget distributed a cameraphone shot of the XBox 360 from the launch party. Nothing new if you’ve been following this, but it’s evidence that Microsoft has dealt with some issues that plagued the original XBox. The new XBox is smaller, better designed and by all reports quieter. The hardware specs are better than the PS2 by a huge margin, and in general it looks to be a great console in the making. And they got rid of the hard drive. I might lift my Microsoft ban for this console, that’s how good it is.

Good hardware only takes you so far (look at the original XBox). The games matter more, of course, and Microsoft has figured out the games. More importantly, they’ve figured out the advertising. The new XBox Live commercial for Forza Motorsports is absolutely perfect for the game. This commercial explains why people game online. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it it’s memorable. Sony hasn’t had one of these in a while.

Last item: I’ve been looking high and low for the Logitech PSP case. I’ve looked EVERYWHERE, even dragging Heidi and my Mom to both malls by my parents’ place to see if they had it in stock. Sold out everywhere. Sounds good for the PSP, right? Wrong. Every store that carries PSPs still has them in stock. The Best Buy in West Hartford has a pallet of them sitting there. That’s just the stores that carry the PSP, by the way. No PSPs in Target (carries the PS2, the XBox, and the Gamecube) or Sears or a few other places I’ve checked. I haven’t checked Wal Mart.

Accessories and games are hard to find, too, though I think that will get better over time. I’m curious to see if the PS3 will fall behind the XBox 360 to the same extent the original XBox did versus the PS2. They’ll have about the same head start and I think better market acceptance. Could be an interesting few years in the game market. Microsoft may be about to get something (outside of Windows and Office) right. About freaking time.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my PSP but I don’t think it’s in the same market as the XBox 360. I also don’t think taking a year off to build this thing is going to stop people this winter from dumping hundreds of dollars in a game console upgrade. The curious thing will be to see if XBox Live does as well as many expect considering it still costs money. I wish they would just roll the costs of Live into the game prices…

(disclaimer: I just bought a tiny bit of Yahoo stock)

I know I’m not the first to say this, but I think Yahoo is moving forward with some cool new ideas that I think will end up making them money. They’re one of the few big companies that get the future of syndicated content (RSS or Atom, for example). Take their new Yahoo 360 service. Among all the usual features you’d expect from a thing like Orkut or Friendster, they have this little announcement:

Coming soon…

You’ll be able to share your RSS-enabled content (blogs, photos, etc.) in Yahoo! 360°.

What I think this means is that soon, I’ll be able to have my 360 page display posts from FatMixx, my photos from Flickr, and my bookmarks from del.icio.us. That’s pretty cool.

It’s even more cool when you think about what they’re doing with 360 and My Yahoo. They’re going to be able to bring together all of this different content that they don’t have to worry about creating directly. That’s a good plan for them, because they don’t have to worry about the tools to manage your photos (though they did buy Flickr), don’t necessarily have to force people to use their blogging software, and generally can just take advantage of the fact that people go there for a lot of other things. It’s nice being a portal.

The one thing I’m reading into the presentation of 360 is that perhaps they’ll have specialized display elements for different types of data. It’s all RSS, but an RSS feed that’s just photos is different from an RSS feed with comics strips even though both contain images. It would be nice if they could provide little widgets that focused on a particular set of tasks. Little details, like sorting or persistence behavior would need to be different so it might not be that complicated to build. That would be a nice touch.