Reuters has an interesting article up: Microsoft Planning New Xbox Live Features. There’s some talk of server-side data storage, and speculation as to if or how that interacts with the rumors that XBox Next (or whatever the next console ends up being called) won’t have a hard drive.

I dunno, I’m skeptical. I’m not going to rip songs for a custom soundtrack and store them on MS’s servers! Nor would I save my games there. And to rely too much on server-side storage would be to cut out all the people who don’t have their XBoxes online (which is probably most of them).

I just hope MS rethinks this. Not including a hard drive just seems like a huge step backwards…