Sometimes, modesty is so transparently false that it's best to dispense with it altogether. We've been sitting on an absolutely terrific interview with Microsoft entertainment and devices corporate vice president Peter Moore since January. Though, in fairness to our staff, we've been so busy with other things that it's been difficult to set aside the time to transcribe this 62-minute whopper of a Q&A. So difficult, in fact, that reliable sources informed us that Moore had begun to despair of ever seeing his words in print. Well, despair no more, Peter. Despair no more.

Beginning today, we're kicking off with the first installment of our four-part interview. Moore, who prior to joining Microsoft in January of 2003 was a veteran of both Reebok and Sega of America, sat down with us for lunch during the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show at the Brazilian restaurant Rumjungle. Upon arriving at the eatery, we found Moore deeply ensconced in the final ticks of the Philadelphia Eagles win over the New York Giants for the NFC wild card playoff spot, discoursing with his handler all the while about various nuances of the game. Thus began our wide-ranging conversation.

From hearing you talk just now, it sounds as if you're a pretty big football fan.

American football, I should specify.

When I first came to this country, it was very clear to me, as much as soccer still rules my life--I lived in L.A. and became an L.A. Rams fan, of all things--and I determined that unlike most Brits who come here and go to the British pub and for whatever, I was going to learn baseball, which I did, and watch the L.A. Dodgers. Steve Garvey, Ron Cey, Mike Scioscia, Tommy Lasorda, Bill Russell--all of those guys. I was a salesman, a shoe salesman, I lived in Long Beach, and I would drive north in the day and then come back and learn baseball with one of the great teams. Then I learned American football. And then worked for Reebok for eight years in Boston, which made me a Patriots fan. So yes. Sorry.

No, that's okay. Do you miss sports in your current incarnation? Obviously you guys got out of the sports business. You were big on sports games at Sega; first as a platform manufacturer and then again as a third-party publisher. Do you miss it?

Well, I don't miss it personally, because I've got so many opportunities still. I subscribe at home to every sports network that I possibly can.. Soccer in particular. I subscribe to Fox Soccer Channel, which every soccer fan in America now has got 24 hours a day. It goes from English Premier League, to Spain in the afternoon, to Italy in the evenings, to Argentina at night, and left to my own devices, I'd just sit there watching Fox Soccer Channel. But I'm also a very big American football fan. I was at the Seahawks game last night; I'll be at the Super Bowl, as I typically find a way of getting there.

I love baseball. I am a die hard Red Sox fan. I love the drama and what baseball means to American culture, and the history of baseball. I'm too young for Ted Williams, but I feel like I've read every book about Ted Williams and what that era meant to Americans; a guy who fought in World War II and then fought in Korea, and yet in between was one of the greatest hitters that baseball's ever seen. Baseball even more than football weaves itself into the fabric of American culture.

And of course, I was a P.E. teacher in my first life, so I did a lot of work on the psychology of sport and the sociology of sport. In fact, my thesis was for my bachelor's degree--this was in England, before I'd even been to America--was the theory of centrality in American sports: the closer that an athlete was to the decision-making process in the game, the less likely he was to be black. I don't know if you've ever heard of that theory, but a guy called Harry Edwards at Berkeley, who I started reading about in 1974, had the theory of centrality, and the theory holds out. I learned how to do pie charts--if you look at the center in football; the catcher in football; in those days, the QB or the pitcher--I'm still talking the mid-'70s at this point when I was doing this, the further away you got from the action, the blacker it became. So what they called the skill positions, cornerbacks and wide receivers, were more likely to be black. But to this day, a center is likely to be white. Even to this day, the stats bear it out. So anyway, that fascinated me about American football. I learned about tackles and guards even before I'd seen a game, by doing this as part of my college education. Harry Edwards is still to this day a very well known professor at Berkeley who looks at, in particular, black athletes. He was behind Tommy Smith and John Carlos in the [1968] Olympics, with the Black Panther movement. Harry Edwards has always lived on the fringe of--well, you know of Harry Edwards.

Absolutely.

Great guy. Incredible human being.

Edging back towards games. You're obviously well-read, cultured, knowledgeable. How much of that do you get to bring out in your day-to-day? Or is all of this off to the side now?

Well, I look at my life--I was a lad from Liverpool that was born to very hard-working, working-class people. My mom was sent away during the war. My dad left school at 14. My dad fought in the war, Royal Artillery--really, quite frankly, uneducated--he would have told you the same thing--and clawed his way into running a business. We owned a pub, and my dad had no business--my dad couldn't really write, and my dad would take down everything he could in a written ledger. This was before calculators, and would do longhand multiplication, and eventually our pub became what turned out to be like a million-pound a year business. Built it through hard work, charisma of his personality.

My father also had a harelip and a cleft palate. Had a huge speech impediment. If he were still alive and sat here today, there is no way in the world you would understand him. My dad would be speaking English, but you combine a Liverpool accent, a harelip and a cleft palate all together, and it's almost unintelligible. But through sheer power of will and charisma and personality, and the power of his love of Liverpool Football Club, he parlayed into actually building a business around that, because people loved to come to the pub to argue with my dad about football. Little did they know that he was clever enough that they were spending a lot of money doing that buying drinks.

To this day--my dad made me open the pub while he rested, because working in a pub is a lot of hours. I would come from school when I was 12 and I would open the club--completely illegal--at 5:30 pm and then I would go upstairs and bring him downstairs at 8 o'clock and he would take over till midnight. But from 12 years old, I was dealing with adults--I was serving them alcohol. My personality comes out of dealing with adults at an early age and [later] being a schoolteacher. So I look at that, N'Gai, as the underpinnings of who you are as a human being. And while it has no direct bearing on the business, it's who you are; it's self-esteem and self-confidence, nothing I haven't seen in my life, stuff like that. I've grown up seeing my parents just sweat their way to giving us a better life and then my hope is that my kids give their kids a better life. You look at what you expect of generations; without my dad getting us out of Liverpool, I'd still be in Liverpool today. God only knows what I'd be doing. Very proud of being a Liverpudlian, but wouldn't want to live there.

This might be making to too much of things, but let's look at your professional history. Reebok was behind the market leader Nike; you were competing with them and trying to go toe to toe with them.

Yeah.

Sega; behind Sony and Nintendo, and competing with them.

Right, right.

Then Sega went third party, and you were competing with EA. And now you're at Microsoft, competing with Sony.

Yeah.

Obviously, Microsoft has very deep pockets. In terms of your childhood or your previous business experience before Microsoft, is there something in you that draws you to go up against a market leader?

Absolutely. Particularly when I went from Reebok to Sega, I've always enjoyed being that feisty second-place guy that's clawing hard to get respect in the marketplace, build market share and get the credibility from a business point of view that's needed. When we finally become the market leader, you ask yourself, "Okay, how do you keep the adrenaline flowing every day?" And I often wonder whether that has been in the last six to nine months part of Sony's problem, where you get the this concept of the arrogance of the incumbent: you don't know failure and you don't know struggle, because all you've known is success. As a result, you have a different bearing on the way you do business every day, because it comes from a platform of being number one and successful, instead of a platform of being number two and striving for success.

They're two typically different mind sets. There's pioneers and settlers. The pioneers get the arrows, but a lot of guys like to be pioneers, get in, launch, and find something else to do. It's a startup mentality a lot of people have. I'm not sure I'm quite there, but there's a lot of people that enjoy building things, getting in there, establishing them, then stepping away and going to do the same thing again. I love the idea of the fight, the challenge. Getting respect where respect doesn't exist. Building something that didn't exist before. Sega was the perfect company for that, because there was a history of irreverence, and it was a company that, quite frankly. had been the number one with the Genesis and done very well, challenged Nintendo, gotten to the top spot, but then for whatever reason, wasn't able to maintain it.

If you do get to number one--

That doesn't mean I'm leaving. [Laughs]

No, no, no, that wasn't what I was going to say. But if you do get to number one, do you already have a plan for it? Or are you going to be like Robert Redford at the end of "The Candidate," looking at the camera and saying, "What do we do now?"

What I won't be is--you know, one of my heroes is Sir Winston Churchill. I take that from my parents regaling me with stories of growing up in Liverpool; the blackouts; the Germans coming over every night; and the only thing you had was listening to Churchill. But when victory was declared in Europe, they kicked Churchill's ass out of there, because they didn't need a warrior; they needed somebody to rebuild the country.

I don't think I'm that. The plan would be to continue to build on that success. You come at success differently if you've known a lot of failure or you've known a lot of struggle. When we get into market leadership, the goal is to continue to build upon that and make sure that you don't fall into complacency and slip back into second place. There was a time when Reebok was the number one company and Nike had been knocked off the top perch. The aerobics craze catapulted Reebok into huge prominence and market leadership. But then they didn't recognize the movement toward different styles, and when aerobics started to die out, they had no plan to replace that business with anything else.

Next: Was Xbox 360's year one software truly next-gen? And why hasn't the $299 Core boosted overall Xbox 360 sales to a greater degree?