When I came home with my shiny new Xbox 360 waaaaaay back in 2005, one of my favorite features of the console was the dashboard. The blades were an amazing leap from the clumsy interface of the original Xbox, offering all sorts of expanded control, options, and content that I didn’t even imagine in the previous generation’s hardware.

But nothing lasts forever, and after a few years of noble service, the Xbox 360 dashboard is really starting to show its age and, worse, its limitations. You can find hints of these shortcomings in Microsoft’s recent actions. The back-to-back May announcements of no Spring update and the delisting of selected Xbox Live Arcade titles suggested larger issues. Even the comments made by Microsoft executives on the topic were telling—like when Xbox Live GM Marc Whitten said of the decision not to offer a Spring dashboard update that they were instead:

“building the proper infrastructure and scale for the service.”

Or when Aaron Greenberg commented on the delisting of Xbox Live Arcade games:

“I think that we are not, I would say…happy with the ability to find and discover content as easily as we’d like for consumers to be able to do that.”

So, Microsoft acknowledges the problem. Is there a solution? I think so. Lots of them, actually. We’ve spent some time on our recent podcasts talking about the need for a dashboard 2.0. I decided to take it a step further, look at what exists currently, and suggest some ways to improve things—yes, for Microsoft—but primarily for Xbox 360 users.

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