NEWS - Wednesday, September 19, 2001
Ed Fries discusses the Xbox launch
Ed Fries (pronounced: Ed Freeze)The vice president of Microsoft’s games division discusses the upcoming launch of the Xbox, the supporting marketing campaign, and a variety of other issues, including the bundling of the hardware.
Anticipation is running high at Microsoft’s Xbox games division. The console, which is the software giant’s first entry into the highly competitive video game market, will be launched in North America on Thursday, November 8. In preparation for that date, a variety of things--ranging from the launch of Microsoft’s 500 million dollar marketing campaign for the console to the actual manufacturing of the hardware units--must be planned, coordinated, and ultimately implemented. Console launches are both demanding and tedious at the same time, and one of the men in the middle of all the pandemonium is Ed Fries, vice president of Microsoft’s games division. His primary duties involve managing the first-party lineup of Xbox games, which includes Halo and Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee, but the soft-spoken Fries also has a hand in crafting the overall strategy of launching the Xbox. So, we recently tracked him down to get an all-encompassing update on the status of the Xbox in the final weeks before launch.
