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How IBM Out-foxed Intel With The Xbox 360

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the beat-them-to-the-punch dept.

xcaverx writes "Learning from failure is a hallmark of the technology business. Nick Baker, a 37-year-old system architect at Microsoft, knows that well. A British transplant at the software giant's Silicon Valley campus, he went from failed project to failed project in his career. He worked on such dogs as Apple Computer's defunct video card business, 3DO's failed game consoles, a chip startup that screwed up a deal with Nintendo, the never successful WebTV and Microsoft's canceled Ultimate TV satellite TV recorder. But Baker finally has a hot seller with the Xbox 360, Microsoft's video game console launched worldwide last holiday season."

4 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. Ahh, the litany of failure by faloi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I always chuckle when my company brings on someone that's been directly responsible (at the executive level) for busines decisions in other companies that have failed misserably. Often, they recite all their past experiences, and the only thing I can think of is "Why did we hire them, and how much are we spending?"

    --
    "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
  2. Re:Not so fast Billy Ray... by mikeisme77 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Considering they also hired Peter Moore to do the marketing for the XBox 360 (who also handled the failed marketing for the failed Dreamcast--although I, personally LOVED the Dreamcast and was sad when it died...) I would say he's probably batting 1,000. You don't take a team of failures and expect them to succeed.

    But yes, I agree it is too early to make a call either way on this. Although if they don't get a killer app on the system before the PS3 & Wii launch (or on the launch dates of the PS3 & Wii) then I think their SOL and will be dead in the water. By that time the 360 will have been out for a year, and if they don't have a killer app after a year then that's definitely not a good sign...

    --
    Read my blog posts on usability.
  3. 'Out-foxed'? No... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Microsoft went with IBM because they didn't want to get embarrassed by Sony and Nintendo with the uncompetitive chips from Intel and AMD.

    A very senior engineer at NVidia I know is talking more and more about how they see Intel and AMD's x86 chips as dead weight dragging them down and how they would like to make x86 irrelevant by moving all application and OS functionality onto their boards.

    The winners ended up being:

    IBM
    Sony
    Nintendo
    Microsoft

    And the losers ended up being:
    Intel - The big loser in all of this
    AMD - Less so
    Apple - Once IBM won all three console contracts they decided Apple was no longer worth the hassle for only 4% of their chips sales - buh bye!

    If you love sitting around playing with SPEC and Intel's marketing compiler or hangout at aceshardware or other x86 fanboy sites you probably see things differently. Heh.

    But the fact that a company sees there is a viable market for another 2-300 performance add on for x86 gaming systems in the PhysX boards should be as clear an indication as anyone needs to how far x86 is falling behind.

  4. Offtopic? by Manmademan · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Funny story about Web TV- when I used to sell electronics back in the day, the little buggers were practically boomerangs. People would buy them so grandma had something cheap and easy to get online with, but grandma and grandpa would either

    1.) not understand the whole "monthly fee" part of it and return it or

    2.) Get confused anyway, and return it.

    We had stacks, and stacks, and stacks of unsellable returned Web TV's that no one wanted. If Web TV shipped a million units, I'd be amazed if more than half actually stayed in homes once purchased.