In the throes of the 23-day PlayStation Network Outage, when people were vowing they’d sell their PS3s and go join Xbox Live, Microsoft’s most provocative comment was a low-key prediction that it would see more traffic on its service. Yesterday, though, Xbox’s senior executive finally said what’s bad for the goose is bad for the gander.
“It’s bad for the industry that this has happened to Sony,” Dennis Durkin, the chief operating officer of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, told IndustryGamers. “[W] e don’t wish that upon anybody and you’ve seen we’ve been actually pretty quiet on the subject because we don’t want to appear to even be looking to be taking advantage of somebody else’s situation like that. That’s just not in our DNA,” he said.
It’s polite and professional, and just plain sensible PR, to not revel in your rivals’ multibillion-dollar misfortunes. But what probably inform’s Durkin’s there-but-for-the-grace-of-God perspective is the fact that Xbox Live is shifting its attention to “the cloud”, i.e. to servers that the bad guys can (and, likely, eventually will) attack.
So while Durkin says Microsoft does “everything it can to be sure users’ data is secure”, he did say that “it is the consumer’s responsibility also to do a number of things to try to protect their data”, such as not using the same password across multiple sites, especially super-important ones. Like Xbox Live.
Xbox COO on PSN and Hacking: We Do Everything We Can to Protect Xbox Live Data [Industry Gamers]
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