NEWS - Thursday, January 18, 2007
Gates Notes Competitor ’Failings’
In an interview with San Jose Mercury News, he talks about the company's decision not to announce a bigger hard drive for Xbox 360 at the same time as the IPTV announcements at CES last week. He also talks at the console wars and the respective strategies of Sony and Nintendo. On a Bigger Hard Drive and IPTV “In an IPTV environment, there is no reason to put anything down on a hard disk because you created a broadband infrastructure that has enough capacity to stream individual video streams to everybody on the network. We don’t need to change [Xbox 360] at all to do the IPTV thing.” On Xbox 360 vs Media Center “If people are comparing Microsoft to Microsoft, we have no concern. It’s OK. There is enough uncertainty about who wants PC coming down in the living room and Xbox coming up that I don’t mind them meeting and even overlapping as long as the point system, the user interface, the development tools – as long as we get this incredible alignment. The name spaces are the same. Your gamertag is the same on those two things.” On the Xbox 360 Strategy “It’s working perfectly. We wanted to be the guy with the small box that costs less. We wanted to have the most games. We wanted to play to our software strength, and tools and online. We wanted to swap positions with Sony. We wanted to not be a year late, not be a big box, not be a more expensive box. How are we doing on that?” On Nintendo “Look at the resolution you get with a controlled experience like that. Say to yourself, how in terms of using a game for a long period of time, what kind of accuracy and capability do you want? Look at the classic Nintendo positioning. Look at the graphics. Look at Nintendo’s execution in terms of online capability.” On Sony “ They were going to have the Cell be the video processor. But they didn’t know what they were doing. They said the Cell is the video processor. But they turned to Nvidia at the last minute, but Nvidia can’t do embedded DRAM. Go look at the bandwidth problems. Go ask the guys running … now. They took their year and burned it by not having a decent CPU strategy and then turning to Nvidia at the last minute. It’s a very unusual thing. Those processors are isolated from each other. On Xbox Live “We have this thing that nobody has ever seen before. When you say to your friend, hey let’s play online…you have to buy an Xbox. That’s what 10 million people say. If you want to play online, get an Xbox. We’re not standing still. Look at what you saw today connecting up the world to the Windows PC. Do you expect Nintendo to rev up a team to create cross-device gaming and tool kits to develop those things? Not very likely. On Xbox vs PS2 “We claim we’re better [in this generation]. It doesn’t matter. It’s just like pointing at the Xbox 1. We were 20 percent better. But it didn’t matter. We were a year late, didn’t have the best games. We had this bigger box. We did have online. We didn’t switch positions on that.” On Viva Pinata “In my household, everybody plays Viva Pinata.” Interview from Dean Takahashi at San Jose Mercury NewsSource: http://www.next-gen.biz/
