As has already been covered on the site today, Microsoft had the breaking announcement that they will not have any restrictions on their content, and there will be no 24 hour online checks to make sure that you didn’t commit the ghastly crime of borrowing a game from your friend.

The crazy thing about this is…They listened to us. 

For really the first time in history, we the public have an EXTREMELY influential voice on the direction of an industry. Microsoft had their big announcement at E3 last week and it was met with nearly universal disappointment. No one liked the path that the industry would go if DRM was put into place and was successful. The public took to twitter, blogs, Facebook, YouTube and whatever other type of media we could get to and told Microsoft that we thought it was a bad idea. And they listened.

This isn’t the first time that it’s happened, but this is by far the largest scale that it has happened. Last year’s ending of Mass Effect 3 was met with so much scorn that they decided to give us an add on at no cost in order to placate the masses. The general public is even starting to control the direction of other industries as well, multi million dollar industries like college sports.

In December of 2011, Dennis Erickson was fired from Arizona State University as its head football coach and the search for a new coach got underway immediately. A new coach, June Jones, had a contract agreed to, and ASU “leaked” the story that they were going to hire him. The fan backlash was so extravagant that they pulled the offer from Jones, and ended up hiring Todd Graham. This move ended up being beneficial for the team, however we will never know if the University officials made the right decision in the first place.

The fact that twitter and Facebook is so prevalent in the world now can completely change the way that companies market to the public. No longer do companies have to pay a focus group to test their ideas and find out their opinions from an extremely small sample size, they can now just test what whatever crazy idea they have on the general public, and if the public hated it they can say, “JK! LOLZ!” we didn’t mean that! We’re going to do exactly what you wanted!

So now general public…What else can we change??