Microsoft Considered Giving Away Original Xbox

donniebaseball23 writes While the term 'Xbox' is firmly implanted in every gamer's mind today, when Microsoft first set out to launch a console in 2001, people weren't sure what to expect and Microsoft clearly wasn't sure what approach to take to the market. As Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley explained, "In the early days of Xbox, especially before we had figured out how to get greenlit for the project as a pure game console, everybody and their brother who saw the new project starting tried to come in and say it should be free, say it should be forced to run Windows after some period of time." Blackley added that other ideas were pushed around at Microsoft too, like Microsoft should just gobble up Nintendo. "Just name it, name a bad idea and it was something we had to deal with," he said.

Comments

Dumping

[rodrigoandrade]

Microsoft using their leverage in other areas to elbow their way into a new market? You don't say...

I'm sure the U.S. Commerce Secretary and the FTC would've had a field day over this.

Re:Dumping

[gstoddart]

And, as usual, without having the slightest idea of what to do with the technology other than try to get market share.

So I'm forced to conclude most of the successes Microsoft has had in the last decade or more have largely been accidental instead of strategic, and that Microsoft just stumbles around in the dark until something works.

And then they spend years trying to understand why it worked in the first place and how to replicate it.

It's official, Microsoft is the Inspector Clouseau of the tech world.

That's pretty sad.