Microsoft is gearing up for a dogfight. It wants its forthcoming Xbox 360 to be the alpha male among gamers. But it will have to go over the Sony PlayStation 3 to get there.

Redmond hopes connecting the Xbox to the television and the Internet will help it unseat Sony. In May, it unveiled Xbox 360, its next-generation game machine, expected to ship for the 2005 holiday season.

And Sony's PlayStation 3 is due in spring 2006. Microsoft games, such as its killer Halo series, will be the main attraction, but Xbox 360 will act as a media platform.

"This is a dogfight between ourselves and Sony," Bryan Lee, Microsoft's vice president for home entertainment, said at a Piper Jaffray analysts' conference on Tuesday.

But there could be another dogfight -- an internal one. Could Xbox 360 eat into the market for Windows Media Center?

"There is the possibility that Xbox could cannibalize the Windows Media Center business -- the only difference [in functionality] being television content itself," said tech analyst Rob Enderle. "If you want personal video recording capabilities or want to buy movies online and move them around the home, the Xbox won't do that."