Engadget were lucky enough to interview Bill Gates at CES. Here's what he had to say about the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3, and also the HD-DVD v Blu-Ray battle.
Here's some of the key points to come out of the interview:
- There will be 50 Xbox 360 game titles by the "middle of the year".
- New peripherals also coming out include the Xbox 360 camera, and some PC connections so that you can text message between your PC and Xbox 360 (among other things).
- Gates confirmed that they are not specially trying to get Halo 3 ready for the PS3 launch - "... it's up to the team when they want to ship that, and they're going to take their time to make that a super great product. So even we don't know when that will come out."
On being ready to taking on Sony later this year:
We've got a lot of things that they don't know that we're doing, so we'll keep them on edge a bit. We think that this whole thing has become very software centric; that is, the toolkits that let developers do their best creative work -- that plays to our software strength, as well as the idea of Live, where we had to learn a lot with Xbox 1, and the decision to require broadband, to go with VoIP, but we learned a lot about wanting to put things into the operating system so you can chat even while you're playing the games, it's really a level of richness that the games are built on top of that we didn't have that last time. We learned how to do that, we learned about contests and spectators, and so this is really a second generation of Live for us. It's very based on software expertise, so it will be interesting to see what Sony does in that dimension.
We also now have a situation where if your friend has already bought an Xbox and you go to buy something that you want to play with them, it's not like last time where at his house you play his game and at your house you play your game. Now it's all online, you've got your achievements and things, so it will be a fascinating competition.
On Microsoft choosing HD-DVD over Blu-Ray:
I think the best thing would be to have a common standard for the industry that would include great things like Managed Copy. The studios have to be willing to take that risk to let consumers have that flexibility, otherwise I think they're just making a mistake that the next digital format may not get to critical mass at all, no matter which one it is. I also think the interactivity, there should be some alignment around that, but eventually there probably will be some coming together and it's not easy to predict when that will be.
Read more at Engadget
http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/09/the-engadget-interview-bill-gates-again/
Here's some of the key points to come out of the interview:
- There will be 50 Xbox 360 game titles by the "middle of the year".
- New peripherals also coming out include the Xbox 360 camera, and some PC connections so that you can text message between your PC and Xbox 360 (among other things).
- Gates confirmed that they are not specially trying to get Halo 3 ready for the PS3 launch - "... it's up to the team when they want to ship that, and they're going to take their time to make that a super great product. So even we don't know when that will come out."
On being ready to taking on Sony later this year:
We've got a lot of things that they don't know that we're doing, so we'll keep them on edge a bit. We think that this whole thing has become very software centric; that is, the toolkits that let developers do their best creative work -- that plays to our software strength, as well as the idea of Live, where we had to learn a lot with Xbox 1, and the decision to require broadband, to go with VoIP, but we learned a lot about wanting to put things into the operating system so you can chat even while you're playing the games, it's really a level of richness that the games are built on top of that we didn't have that last time. We learned how to do that, we learned about contests and spectators, and so this is really a second generation of Live for us. It's very based on software expertise, so it will be interesting to see what Sony does in that dimension.
We also now have a situation where if your friend has already bought an Xbox and you go to buy something that you want to play with them, it's not like last time where at his house you play his game and at your house you play your game. Now it's all online, you've got your achievements and things, so it will be a fascinating competition.
On Microsoft choosing HD-DVD over Blu-Ray:
I think the best thing would be to have a common standard for the industry that would include great things like Managed Copy. The studios have to be willing to take that risk to let consumers have that flexibility, otherwise I think they're just making a mistake that the next digital format may not get to critical mass at all, no matter which one it is. I also think the interactivity, there should be some alignment around that, but eventually there probably will be some coming together and it's not easy to predict when that will be.
Read more at Engadget
http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/09/the-engadget-interview-bill-gates-again/
