I recently read an article on The Verge - which is my favorite tech blog - about how Microsoft is re-branding it's Zune music service to leverage its Xbox brand (article here). The change in branding makes a huge amount of sense, since MSFT is no longer producing Zune branded hardware, but it also got me asking, "Why would they be converging all of their products to 'XBox Live'?" Let's look into the history a bit...
The original Xbox was code-named "DirectX box" and subsequently shortened to Xbox before it was released in 2001. Primarily billed as a standalone gaming ...