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XBox (Games) Microsoft

Bill Gates on the 360 40

Posted by Zonk from the i-wonder-what-he-plays-in-ffxi dept.
Engadget had a sit-down with Bill Gates at CES, and they talk for a good while about the Xbox 360's launch and subsequent issues. From the article: "We played quite a variety. Actually, the Xbox Arcade was a big thing, a lot of the adults wanted to sit down and play for five or ten minutes. It was Hexic or Zuma that were easy for them to learn the rules, get used to the controller. We had some younger kids who were just beating the heck out of me at Project Gotham Racing, Kameo, basketball, Perfect Dark Zero. We have, I think, a dozen titles in total."
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Bill Gates on the 360 More

Bill Gates on the 360

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  • Don't bother (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mursk ( 928595 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @07:49PM (#14431964)
    Don't bother reading the article (not that most do). There's hardly any Xbox talk, and most of the rest of the stuff is freaking boring. This doesn't really belong in the Games section, IMO.

    • Re:Don't bother (Score:4)

      by FinestLittleSpace ( 719663 ) * on Monday January 09, 2006 @07:56PM (#14431999)
      Yes, agreed. I find Gates interviews an absolute joy to read (he is a bloody good speaker) but they say NOTHING useful. Ever. And this is no exception. He needs proper probing one day. One day...

      • He Lies through his teeth! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by tb3 ( 313150 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:07PM (#14432052) Homepage
        "Apple has always leveraged technologies that the PC industry has driven to critical mass, the bus structures, the graphics cards, the peripherals, the connection networks, things like that, so they're kind of in the PC ecosystem and kind of not."
        There's no way he could have said that with a straight face. It should be more like, "the PC industry has always leveraged technologies that Apple pioneered." Stuff like local area networking, laser printers, 3.5 diskettes, digital cameras, USB, Firewire, ....
        • It's an interesting spin he's got, but there's a grain of truth to it.

          Apple may have invented USB (I don't know the history of it), but today most USB devices are connected to Windows based computers. If Windows hadn't adopted USB, it wouldn't have become the standard that it is. Apple has had it's share of proprietary failures too - I don't see a lot of NuBus systems today for example.

          It's an ecosystem, and both companies are part of it.

          • Re:He Lies through his teeth! (Score:5, Informative)

            by LoRdTAW ( 99712 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @09:28PM (#14432495)
            Apple invented fire wire not USB. It was proposed back in the 80's as an SCSI replacement. It was fully developed in the 90's and made it debut at nearly the same time USB did. I think USB was either first developed by Intel or adopted by Intel, can't say for sure. Fire wire never gained popularity over USB because Apple had a hefty per port license fee along with naming problems (Supposedly no one but Apple could call it Fire Wire). Apple used the name Fire Wire, Sony called it I-link and most others called it 1394. Imagine joe six pack presented with three names for the same thing. The only thin that really saved it was its wide adoption in the video world as the interface for most every DV cam.
            • The only thin that really saved it was its wide adoption in the video world as the interface for most every DV cam.

              Take it back a step: FireWire is popular because there is no viable alternative. It's the fastest thing available.

              • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
                Comment removed based on user account deletion
                • Yeah, but there is no USB equivalent of Firewire 800....(most pcs don't even have firewire, let alone firewire 800 though)
                • As far as I understand, firewire typically performs better under real world circumstances due to differences in the way data transfer is handled. Of course, this isn't really an issue for stuff like ipods and the like, hence the migration to usb only.
                • USB2 is faster in theory but dramatically slower than fw400 in practice. Also it consumes a lot of CPU because of the shit interface to USB. I forget the details but someone (toms? anand?) had a head to head where they compared usb2 and fw400 and on a 2+ GHz P4 (IIRC) the USB was half the speed of the fw400 and used about 10 or 12% of the CPU getting there, the fw400 access used about 0.5% CPU. USB is shit. IEEE1394 is wonderful. Too bad no one made any native FW devices.
            • Apple wanted $1 per port to use the name FireWire, not for the technology itself, and the extra cost was to recoup co-marketing expenses - the actual technology was licensed as IEEE1394 for the standard rate most people including Intel charge for technologies, something like 25 cents per port. Sony called it iLink because they didn't want to pay Apple's marketing cost, which was perfectly fine with Apple. Incidentally, Intel let manufacturers avoid co-marketing costs if they agreed to exclusively put "Int

        • Take a look in your Mac (Score:4, Informative)

          by snuf23 ( 182335 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @11:58PM (#14433145)
          And you will find mostly commodity PC components now. Let's see:

          PCI bus = check
          ATA or SATA hard drive = check
          ATA CD/DVD/ROM/R drive = check
          Standard PC style graphics card or chip = check
          USB = check (while Apple was one company in the standards body, so were Microsoft and Intel among many others)
          DVI connector for monitor = check
          Standard Ethernet using TCP/IP = check

          And coming soon... Intel x86 CPU

          Interestingly, it seems that Apple is phasing out Firewire (which it did create) in favor of USB (see iPod Shuffle, Nano and Video).
          Long gone are Localtalk, ADB, NuBus etc.

          One of the big trends in Apple since Steve Jobs came aboard was transitioning the Macintosh to use lower cost commodity components. This approach in addition to reducing the number of different Macintosh models and configurations, allowed for cost cutting and increased margins on Mac sales.
          I'm not saying Apple hasn't innovated in the hardware space over the years, obviously it has. Today's Apple however leverages commodity hardware and innovates in overall system design, operating system and software.
          • PCI bus = check
            Newer Macs don't use PCI, they use PCIe. Then again, newer PCs use PCIe as well. It seems that everyone went and dropped their older AGP, NuBus, VLB, ISA, EISA, MCA, etc. for a newer standard.

            ATA or SATA hard drive = check
            As opposed to using SCSI which was a commodity PC component?

            ATA CD/DVD/ROM/R drive = check
            See above. Actually, it was Apple that was using SCSI optical drives while the PC was using a mixture of SCSI/Matsushita/Sony/Mitsumi interfaces; SCSI evolved and is still in use wh
            • My point is that none of these items and many of the software parts of todays Mac as well, were not developed in house by Apple. This is in contrast to Apple many years ago which built their own flavor of many components internally.

              PCI/PCI Express - you know what I mean. And it's the same on the PC. It's not like Apple adopted PCI Express before it launched on the PC platform.

              ATA vs. SCSI - Once a long long time ago Apple even tried their hands at making their own hard drive interfaces. I'm talking back in
          • Apple may be phasing out Firewire support on iPods so that they only need to support one way to connect to a computer whether it be PC or Mac. Since both PC's and Mac's have USB ports but many PC's do not have Firewire, it makes sense to use USB. Combine that with the fact that USB 2 is much faster than the original USB was and able to power the iPod as well (probably the reasons for using Firewire in the first place) and it just doesn't make sense to support both USB and Firewire on new iPods anymore.
    • There's lots of talk about the Xbox 360. Did you notice you could scroll down the page? :)

      Here's a very interesting tidbit from the interview re. the recent talk about the external HD-DVD addon for the 360:

      Engadged: You announced yesterday that the Xbox 360 will have an external HD-DVD drive, and so it seems you've firmly committed to that platform as opposed to Blu-ray, but do you risk fragmenting the Xbox 360 as a platform by introducing an HD DVD drive? Is that going to be an issue for developers if s

  • Summary of article (Score:4, Funny)

    by RickPartin ( 892479 ) * on Tuesday January 10, 2006 @02:11AM (#14433675) Homepage
    I haven't read the article but here is an pretty accurate prediction

    Bill: I think the new Xbox is neet.

    There I just saved you all the trouble of reading.

  • Not true (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rseuhs ( 322520 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2006 @05:28AM (#14434251)
    Gates: I mean, we're the hottest product there was at Christmas this year.

    Not true, in this holiday season more units of the 6 year old PS2 were sold than of the brand new XBox360.

    Gates: I don't think there's any doubt we'll have a substantially higher share in this generation than we had last generation.

    XBox360 sold less during the launch-month than XBox1 (in USA about 300000 instead of 500000, in Japan about 50000 instead of 123000 in the first 3 days, and just 70000 in 2005 http://www.the-magicbox.com/topten.htm) so I have lots of doubt that XBox360 will have "substantially higher share".

    And I think Bill has doubts, too.

    Don't forget that Sony sold 100 million units in 5 years and 9 months. Even if Microsoft keeps their new target of 4 million in the first 8 months and we assume that they continue selling at that rate forever, it would take 17 years to reach 100 million units.

    To reach "substantially higher share" with the XBox360, they would need to sell more than with XBox1, right?

    Well, XBox1 was sold 22 million times worldwide. Even if they can keep up 4 million / 8 months, they would need 4 years to get over that number. (Doesn't sound "substantially higher" to me) Of course they will not be able to keep up the current rate of sales and will probably never reach even the XBox1 installed base with XBox360.

    • Well, XBox1 was sold 22 million times worldwide. Even if they can keep up 4 million / 8 months, they would need 4 years to get over that number. (Doesn't sound "substantially higher" to me) Of course they will not be able to keep up the current rate of sales and will probably never reach even the XBox1 installed base with XBox360.
      Microsoft will have to drop Xbox360 prices substantially.

    • It's not quite that cut and dried.

      It is important to take note that right now the 360 is an emergent technology with a high price breakpoint, dependence on expensive peripheral hardware for optimum performance, and a very limited selection of games. This places it squarely in the enthusiast market, and units are selling accordingly.

      Sometime between now and the release of the PS3 each of those factors is going to be greatly reduced. HDTV will become far more common, prices will be lowered significantly

  • Wrong strategy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by the computer guy nex ( 916959 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2006 @11:37AM (#14435857)
    "And I think Bill has doubts, too. "

    1) The 360 has sold fewer units to this point due to the limited supply rather than low demand. This doesn't take away from the "buzz" around the product, rather the opposite.

    2) PS2 has sold over 100 million units, and the 360 will never reach that point for 2 reasons. 1) The 360 is strictly marketed to the United States. Hell Japan barely even knew a new console was coming out, same in Europe. M$ is avoiding the "Land War in Asia" against the PS3. 2) The 360 will make money from Xbox Live rather than extra units.

    Too many people consider this a standard console. Sell a piece of hardware underpriced and make up the difference on a cut of every game sold.

    The 360 is doing the same, but rather relying on Xbox Live membership fees and marketplace downloads. This is a business model that will strive. Every single 360 game is beautifully integrated.

    • Re:Wrong strategy (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The 360 is doing the same, but rather relying on Xbox Live membership fees and marketplace downloads. This is a business model that will strive. Every single 360 game is beautifully integrated.

      Just like it worked with the xbox, -$5 billion four years later.

      I don't know how you can honestly believe that a mere 2 million users paying a small monthly fee can cover the many billions of dollars invested into a console.
    • The 360 has sold fewer units to this point due to the limited supply rather than low demand.

      In the USA that might be true (however according to rumors its only sold out in the big cities) in Europe and Japan it certainly is not.

      The 360 will make money from Xbox Live rather than extra units.

      This is just something that I don't understand. XBox Live isn't new, why should more XBox360 owners want it than XBox1 owners? Either you like online-play or you don't, I don't see how higher graphics resolution wou

    • Yes, but the XBox1 (and I presume Xbox 360) can really shine with the right games. So, although I like to think of the XBox as beating Sony, it's not ture, but I'll take the XBox over PS2 any day.

  • I mean, we're the hottest product there was at Christmas this year.

    Mr. Gates, the hottest product this holiday season was the iPod with 14 million units sold. Oh, sorry about that. That's one of the those heartburn words, sort of like "Google" or "Linux".

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