N'Gai Croal
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May 16, 2007 10:45 AM
Microsoft's Peter Moore and the Kansas City Chiefs' Larry Johnson
In Part I of our four-part Q&A with Microsoft entertainment and devices corporate vice president Peter Moore, he revealed the origins of his love for baseball and American football, discussed the subject of his bachelor's degree thesis, and explained why, if Xbox becomes the market leader, he'd prefer to be seen as its de Gaulle than its Churchill. The subject of our second installment switches from history to math, as we spar about whether or not, in the face of no next-generation console competition, the $299 Xbox 360 Core should have helped Microsoft achieve at least first-year sales parity with the first Xbox. Please note: this interview was conducted during the January 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, without the benefit of sales data from December 2006 and subsequent months.
On to where things are at today. A lot of the executives at Microsoft, yourself included, in the run-up to the release of the Xbox 360 spoke a lot about the importance of being the first to ten million units; that the first to ten million wins. Effectively, that's a statement of unassailability. PS2 certainly got to ten million first and was definitely unassailable. But looking at the position right now, a) we know that it was unclear as to whether that meant ten million shipped or sold--
Right.
--but your position doesn't seem unassailable right now.
So my comment--I'll tell you exactly what I said, because I said it in London a year [ago] last summer, and this is where the ten million number was first heard. It was at the ELSPA conference [Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association], and I said, "History tells us that the first guy that gets to ten million is in a really, really strong position." Those were my exact words. And I still stand by that. History tells us--in our industry anyway--as you know even better than me, that getting that critical mass develops a lot of goodness in the ecosystem. You've got publishers who now have an installed base of substance to sell into. You've got developers who are now used to developing games; are getting used to the architecture; feel comfortable about what they're developing into from a technical point of view. And you've got consumers who are getting a lot of games to choose from, so the selection of games becomes broad and it becomes deep. All of that comes together. So ten million, I think, is a good critical mass, particularly if you can achieve it before the second holiday. And that's always been my point. I don't think anybody ever said, "He who gets to ten million first is in an unassailable position."
I'm pretty sure J [James "J" Allard] said "First to ten million wins."
Did he? Ah...then if J said that, you're going to have to ask J. I can sit here today and tell you I have never said that. But boy, I'd rather be first to ten million that trying to play catch up.
I spoke with John Riccitiello for my blog, and he told me that the reason that hardware sales for 360 were slow for much of 2006 was the lack of truly next-gen software. Would you agree with that?
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