This week Microsoft released a very minor Xbox 360 dashboard update. They said that there were no new features and this was to help insure the future growth of the system and Xbox Live. Now this is intentionally vague but if you read the tea leaves a bit it might shed a light about their plans running into the fall and holiday 2008 video game shopping season.
I suspect that this most recent dash update might just add a list of new servers for first logging into the Xbox Live service. If you listen to E on the last episode of the Major Nelson podcast he said that his team at Xbox Live is getting ready to work their tails off an add servers and network infrastructure. Xbox Live does this when they expect they are going to have a big new number of sales of new Xbox hardware. They have occasionally done this around the launch of GTA IV size games to insure that the Xbox Live service does not get overwhelmed again like it did in December 07/ January 08.
There is the rumored price cuts expected to happen on September 7th. They are probably going to sell a lot of consoles for that. This update might be to get Xbox Live ready for the sales jump they expect when they lower the price of the Xbox with a 60 Gig Hard Drive to $299 and drop the cost of the Xbox 360 Arcade to $199.
Also the Jasper motherboard based Xbox 360s are due almost the same time. So the first week or so of September is going to be a very interesting time for Xbox.
Plus there is Madden 09, Fable 2 and RockBand 2 coming soon.
I suspect the new Xbox 360 Experience that a part of the next major Xbox OS is going to be shown off at Penny Arcade Expo at the end of August. I can’t wait to get my hands on it. Microsoft is going to want to have it ready in time for the big November holiday 08 sales push. My money is on the new Xbox OS software with Avatars out at the end of October to maximize the amount of media hype for November’s games to include mentions of the new OS.
Anyway that is how the tea stems look to me.
Update: I am not a networking expert and am likely totally wrong on how the Xbox Live network actually works but my whole point was that my theory was the update was to adjust for the coming changes to the new systems sales boom that they expect around Madden and the September price drop..
I'm afraid you have little knowledge of how the service is set up; the servers are not hardcoded in to OS.
Adding new servers to the service might well require downtime as they are configured, but it has nothing to do with user updates. Those with enough networking knowledge will be able to tell you that consoles log on using the exact same server cluster/IP address as before the update, and the exact same one since Live was taken down for 3 days in November 2005 to prepare for the 360.
Whilst the server IP addresses and general configuration were changed during that time (such as tying the H2 matchmaking server and VoIP server in to the main cluster, when they were previously separate with their own IP addresses) you may also recall that this didn't involve a system update, only downtime.
Kindly leave the networking speculation to those more in the know.
That would be a very odd way of maintaining a list of servers for a system.
The firmware would have to be updated everytime a set was added or removed, or offline etc
More likely there would simply be one or two DNS entries to a load balancing system hosted at Microsoft, which would then hold the server records.
Oh Snap. I got served. You are right. I am not a networking expert and I was guessing how it worked. I still think my timeline of future events and hardware releases could work out.