NEWS - Sunday, March 19, 2006
Ballmer Wants To Capitalize On PS3 Delay
In every other generation, the first guy to 10 million consoles was the number one seller in the generation," Ballmer told FORTUNE in an interview on Thursday afternoon. "Did we just get an even better opportunity to be the first guy to 10 million? Yeah, of course we did." Microsoft have said that they will not formally revise its projected market share for the Xbox 360, and it will not speed up production to capitalize on Sony’s delay, because it’s already producing the Xbox as fast as possible. "We’ve been saying ’make them faster’ before yesterday," says Ballmer. There is still a production bottleneck because of problems with a component vendor, whom Ballmer declined to name, but he expects Microsoft to sell 5 million systems by June. "We’re sort-of on track," he says, "though it would’ve been nice at Christmas to have one for everyone who wanted one." "I am palpably optimistic," Ballmer says. "I think we are absolutely in the game for the market position it would be nice to have." Ballmer dismissed Sony’s expectation that Playstation’s Blu-Ray DVD player will give it an advantage over the Xbox, which will soon offer an HD-DVD peripheral. "Sony’s going to try and define that as a fundamental battleground, but I don’t think it is a fundamental battleground," he says. "I don’t care whether it’s Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, there’s not going to be a lot of content in either format this year." For now, Ballmer says, the timing advantage is all that matters. "It’s not going to be that way forever," he says, "but we’re clearly in the phase where it’s about how fast we can make them."Source: http://darkzero.co.uk/
