I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about this week, but then Xbox Live’s Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb basically handed me a topic. As you may know, Microsoft plans to use their Silverlight technology to ’refine and enhance’ ads on Xbox Live. If you’re wondering what Silverlight does, this article explains it well. Basically you’re looking at increasingly slick ads on the system, as a competitor to Flash for some of the more annoying ads you’ve already seen on your Dashboard. That sounds pretty bad, though as you saw in his clarification linked above, Major Nelson has suggested we won’t get a Shibuya-like flood of ads, just more ’organic’ ones. I have trouble taking that statement in good faith, and here’s how I think it will really play out.

Mr. Hryb talks about how their ’core philosophy’ is to ’enhance’ the ’experiences they deliver’, and that this will make the ads ’organic’ rather than just giving us more ads. Larry, I’ve got a news flash for you: Most of us are regular people, not corporate executives that need to hear the latest business buzz-words to feel comforted. Don’t talk to us about leveraging your unique paradigm in today’s global market to enhance success across a variety of core demographics, or whatever it is you just went on about in your unhelpful clarification. If you want to make a useful promise, something like "You won’t be seeing a higher number of ads, just more elaborate ones. They won’t cause any system crashes, any (additional) Marketplace lag, or mess with other Xbox Live functions. You’re just getting fancier ads," would have done fine.

But that’s probably not what will really happen, I suspect. Microsoft has lost tons of money on having to provide extended warranty service to all the Xbox 360s that broke via the "Red Ring of Death" issue over the last few years, and they will want to recoup those costs however they can. My guess is they’ll make it easier for companies to make more intrusive, noisy and disruptive "organic and immersive" ads on our Dashboard, and those sponsors will gladly fork over more money for the chance to unleash these enhanced ads on us. Perhaps I’m being alarmist, but I can easily see this becoming an overflow of ads on our Dashboards (more than we already have, that is), despite good ol’ Larry’s corporate style clarification. And I’m definitely worried this could lead to our Dashboards actually locking up, just like a web browser can if too many Flash and Java ads are running at once. I have no hard proof that will happen, but it seems plausible to me when you consider many users have their system freeze for upward of a minute at a time for just pressing the Guide button.