Speaking to IGN, Fries said there were two internal teams at Microsoft pitching Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer on the idea for a game console. The side Fries sided with wanted to create a box that had a hard disk and was basically "a PC in disguise." The other team's system was more akin to a traditional console that would be a "continuation of the Sega Dreamcast line."
Gates ultimately sided with Fries' team, under the idea that the console would run some form of Windows, and they had a year to formulate a business plan about how it would all work. During the planning year, the team eventually decided to drop the Windows angle and instead create a more "closed" system that "runs games really well." This culminated in a meeting with Gates and Ballmer, which took place on Valentine's Day.
"So we go into the meeting and four o'clock Valentine's Day–Bill walks in he's holding a Powerpoint deck and yells, 'This is the blanking insult to everything I've done at this company' and that was the start, so we all looked at [Xbox director and designer J Allard] because we knew Bill's mad about the no Windows thing, because we forgot to 'pre-disaster' him, so J is in shock for a minute and Bill yells at me and shuts me down and Robbie steps up and Bill shuts him down anyway, and then Ballmer goes through and says we're gonna lose a lot of money and he's beating us up about that, hours go by its five o clock, its six o clock, it's Valentines Day! Most of us have something going on!
"So we spent years working on this and looking at each other and convincing them this is the best plan, so finally one of the observers at the meeting just raises his hand and says, 'What about Sony?' and he says, 'Sony is slowly invading the living room with a processor here software there, they could be a threat to Microsoft.' So Bill and Steve stop and look at each other and go, 'Yeah…what about Sony?' And so Bill turns and says, 'I'm going to give you guys everything you want' and Ballmer repeats the same thing. And I turn to Robbie and say, 'That was the weirdest meeting I've ever been in.'"
If you hate your nose get plastic surgery. I'm sure they can make the nose look longer or shorter or whatever you want.
Andrew Watson
jews be jellly
William Gray
The XBOX had a lot of effort put into it exclusives wise, not nearly as many as the PS2 but still a lot of great looking ones. For example games like Phantom Dust or the XB version of Double Agent have better graphics than anything on the PS2/XB. And then you have all those great FromSoft and SEGA games. I could go on all day.
Aaron Roberts
feelio when no nose
Gavin Garcia
Nigger we have known this since 1999/2000 era EGM. The whole Xbox project was because Bill wanted Windows in the living room. Thats why the team got yelled at because they wanted to start with a console without windows and then gradually work their way to a unified ecosystem while Bill wanted it Day 1. Because they didn't want Sony taking the entire living room pie and especially since Sega's mistakes were catching up with them.
We don't need some meme blogger to let us know shit that's been said thousands of times over and documented in biography books.
Jaxson Walker
But can Bill still jump over a chair?
Benjamin Kelly
Then they hired a ton of ex-publisher guys, those cottoned on to the magic "Sony" word, then they spread the word back to their buddies in various publishers and that's been Xbox's reason for life ever since.
Fun extra fact: The original XBOX's run-up was when Microsoft formed a team to experiment with the at-the-time new principles of viral marketing. This team's one of the oldest and most experienced in the industry.
Jose Rodriguez
...
Robert Flores
Being jewish is just a factor. There are many kikes that arent really jewish and plenty of kikes that never rose up positions that high.
Jeremiah Perez
Fixed that for you, Jews have a family tier system, with the most important and smallest percentage at the top, kind of like India's class system and other old culture groups.
Camden Phillips
Daily reminder that (((Bill Gates))) is a crypto-kike.
Benjamin Gutierrez
not vidya
Jaxon Stewart
I can't believe Bill Gates ever seriously thought that Sony was a major threat to windows. All that fucking talking about putting the EE in toasters and general electronics - then networking them together so that you blender could add some processing power to your PS2 - or was that all part of the PS3 Cell hype…? Anyhow, it's fucking ludicrous. Always has been. Sony has some of the dumbest fucking hardware/software hype, and it's always only ever just them blowing shit out their asses in order to hide the fact that their chips are too hard to program for. If Bill had even a slightly competent market analysis - he'd have seen right through their bluff.
Mobile, on the other hand, has been a threat to MS since the iphone - and shit got fucking real when the android released. I fucking hate the direction they're going to try to push the unified Windows platform - slitting the Xbox and PC's throat for the chance of staying relevant in a market where mobile is a major for - but I understand why they think they need to do it in order to hold onto their hordes of jew gold.
Also, no matter how bad Bill Gates is, at least he's not half the angry, thieving, pretentious faggot Steve Jobs is.
Ayden Ross
Sony was getting pretty close to Linux at the time.
Carson Parker
If you looked at the world around you. You'd see that we're about to make the holocaust real.
John Young
That's because Gates had to actually develop and sell his shit before he could settle down. Jobs only ever needed to sell things other people made for him. He's the ideal liberal.
Christopher Watson
But consoles were never positioned as a generalized computing device. A home entertainment center, sure, but still pretty limited in function to multimedia and games. Even if they had been, the console market is tiny. 80~120 million units was phenomenal sell-through, but that's minuscule compared to PCs at both the home and the office.
Tablets and SmartPhones, however, are designed specifically to be generalized computers which can interface with both each other and PCs to allow ease of networking and the portability of files for working on the go. You can get photo-editing software, word processors, spreadsheets, pdfs, integrated email and web, etc - on mobile. Even at their height, Sony ever only advocated horse-shit like viewing photos, movies, and web browsing on their units… and, on the PS2 at least, most of those promises evaporated the moment the Dreamcast dropped from the market.
Liam Clark
Don't post news, reviews etc. Don't spread the enemies of good things.
Hunter Stewart
Right on - information is the enemy! Don't listen to that and definitely don't talk about it. You might piece something together and then you might stop liking what we wan- er, what you enjoy liking. Nobody wants that, do they?
