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

Re:They might as well have.

[Penguinisto]

More than that... in 2012, I had once estimated that they blew $7bn on the enterprise, and though they're raking in something like $200m/yr (IIRC) in profits now
(mostly from dev house licensing), they have yet to fill that titanic money hole they dug with the thing.

Re:Government would've jumped on them

[HBI]

Every successful OS over the microcomputer age has had a killer app, something that it did that other competing machines did not. Something to sell it. Apple IIs had VisiCalc. The IBM PC had Lotus 1-2-3. Macintoshes had Pagemaker and later Quark. Windows had the Office suite, ultimately. OS/2 had nothing. Sure, it was great at running other OS' apps - it was a great DOS emulator and did Windows 3.1 pretty excellently, but it had no killer app of its own. This was mainly because IBM didn't consider it important to get people to write apps for its OS.

You can call that a lack of marketing and still be right. It's just not "marketing in general" but "marketing to developers".