Thursday, September 27, 2007

XBox and XBox 360 Games

Microsoft recently rolled out their long-awaited Halo 3 video game -- an XBox 360 shooter that the company hopes will propel the XBox 360 platform past the competing Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation 3 consoles.

Microsoft is even offering a "Spartan green" Halo 3 Special Editon console. There is also an Elite System Console that includes a number of extras, principally HDMI interface for HDTV and a 120GB detachable hard drive for downloadable content.

XBox Games

Unlike competing console manufacturers, Microsoft has made the XBox 360 backward compatible with existing XBox games. In other words, if you have an XBox system and a collection of XBox games, you can play them on a new XBox 360 console. Regrettably, this feature has thus far inhibited third-party game developers from creating games specifically for the 360, which in turn has hurt sales of the new console.

While the standard XBox is a good gaming system, it lacks the next-generation features of the 360. Microsoft hopes that their new sequel to the popular Halo and Halo 2 shooters will stimulate sales of the new platform, which in turn will encourage developers to use the 360's more advanced feature set. While initial sales of Halo 3 have been brisk, it is still too soon to know how well this strategy will succeed.

As a more mature platform, the Standard XBox has a much greater selection of available games, most of which are available from Amazon.com:

XBox 360 Games

The XBox 360 Console is an advanced gaming platform not only for today, but for years to come. While it's sales were somewhat disappointing initially, new and upcoming game releases are producing renewed interest in the product.

It seems that third-party developers are catching up now with many new entries in the XBox 360 arena coming out in time for Christmas 2007. Heretofore 360 Games have been heavily weighted toward Microsoft Games, but now familiar developers like Electronic Arts, 2K Sports, Eidos , and Capcom are getting into the act.

It's still to soon to tell, but it looks like Microsoft's tortoise may overtake the Sony & Nintedo hares this year.

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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Beauty Mania

Amazon.com periodically rearranges its browsable categories, and sometimes the transition is a little bumpy. While creating this aStore for Beauty products, the Shampoo subcategories disappeared from their page-creation software. No doubt this will be cleared up within a few days, but for now, I'm just going to post the current work in progress and move on to a less volatile area.

Here are the current "Beauty Mania" pages:

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Sunday, September 23, 2007

Sports Mania

It is sometimes said that "a moose is a horse designed by a committee." This is probably unfair to the moose, which is actually quite well adapted to its biological niche. It is probably overly generous to most committees.

In any case, Amazon.com's browsable taxonomy -- the structure of their hierarchy of categories -- seems to suffer from this syndrome. Some of their main categories have have very few top-level subcategories (like Apparel, which has only five). Others are considerably more top-heavy. Sporting Goods is one of those, with over 70 top-level subcategories.

It will probably be desirable to split this store into two or more in the future, but for now here are Amazon.com's top-level subcategories in Sporting Goods:

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