Comments Off July 24th, 2008

How did Bill Gates get popular? It started with Xbox


From venturebeat.com:
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Everybody has an opinion about whether Gates is a good guy or a bad guy. But there is no doubting that his image is a lot different than in 2000, when Ken Auletta painted an unflattering portrait of Gates in his book, “World War 3.0,” about the Microsoft antitrust trial.

With Xbox, Gates had a chance to play the white knight. When Sony started dropping hints about the PlayStation 2 in 1998, Microsoft went into a panic. Sony’s executives were boastful. Soon, they were saying it was going to be the comet to wipe out the dinosaurs and was “more than a PC.” Microsoft had to defend the living room, and Gates’ attempts to partner with Sony fell flat.

The more they toured the industry, the more they found that game developers felt oppressed by the dominant companies, Nintendo and Sony. Microsoft had a crack in the door. It asked developers what they wanted in a game console and tried to give them everything they wanted. The Microsoft team greenlit a lot of games in the hopes of unleashing creativity. And they could build a platform where everyone (except Microsoft itself) could make more money, create the game they wanted to create, and force the Japanese rivals to be more competitive.

That’s the sanitized version of history, for sure. But it could be called a turning point for Gates’ image. It was probably the first time anybody waited in line to buy one of his products at midnight (at least with good reason). And the first time that he could be identified with something that was cooler than anything Apple’s Steve Jobs was doing.
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Full Story: venturebeat.com

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