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An internal team 'hoodwinked' Bill Gates into launching the Xbox project
- abvdasker 6y ago> "There was a meeting in a small conference room with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. And Steve never, I don't think, ever thought it was a good idea. There's a story I've told where I was standing in line in the cafeteria with Kevin, and Steve Ballmer snuck up behind us and yelled in my ear, making me throw my food: 'YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE ALL OUR MONEY!'” Steve Ballmer might be the funniest dude ever to run a tech company. Every story with him is absolutely golden.
- lokar 6y agoFunny or cringe inducing?
- cptskippy 6y agoThe former because of the later.
- phaedryx 6y agoI would hate to work for someone like that.
- op00to 6y agoDepends on how much I got paid.
- flavmartins 6y agoNo, it doesn’t. You like the pay but hate the person. Many of us have been there before. You eventually get fed up and have to move on.
- KMag 6y agoI used to think I would do pretty much anything I didn't find immoral for a million dollars per year. An abusive boss for 80+ hours per week changed my mind. When I quit my third job, my boss told me "Karl, I know you hate me now, but in a couple years, you'll be making a million dollars a year and love me." My response "Even if I believed you, I wouldn't do this job for a million dollars".
- ErikAugust 6y agoLet me guess: You wouldn’t have ended up making a million dollars a year.
- KMag 6y agoMaybe I would have. We were trading interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives in 2006. 2008 / 2009 would have been very volatile. We were generally long volatility, but sometimes we had some legs on some trades that would make significant losses in extreme volatility. It's hard to say. It's possible our 4-person desk could have made 100 million and my boss would have thrown a few my way. It's also possible the desk would have folded. I still think I made the right choice by leaving. You have to live your life, and unless you really love your job, 80+ hours per week in the office is not living your life. Also, I left that macro quant job by calling up Google and asking if they'd re-open the job offer I turned down 4 months earlier. It certainly helped that I had good backup jobs available.
- RobRivera 6y agohaving been employed by an asshole in a previous life, a good enough paycheck makes it manageable. Not saying its healthy tho; I think somepeople have simply mastered the 'embrace the suck' mentality when it comes to toxicity...they call that 'resilience'
- StavrosK 6y agoI now realize how lucky I am to have worked with great people. The worst job I had was just boring.
- CapitalistCartr 6y agoPerhaps the funniest dude ever to ruin a tech company.
- rantwasp 6y agonah. I think Balmer did wonders for Ms. It’s really easy to blame the guy but I think it’s important to look at the context (of when he took over, what he actually did) also, he is the only CEO I routinely saw at the “corporate gym” in Redmond before the pandemic struck. No bodyguards, no nothings. Like a regular dude going to the gym, hanging out in the sauna/jacuzzi. He had a super positive attitude towards the staff and other people that would strike up a conversation. While I did not the to have the image of a naked Ballmer burned into my retinas, I do appreciate that he did not let all that wealth go to his head.
- nailer 6y agoWhen he started Microsoft had the most popular OS, web browser and mobile OS. A decade later they lost all three and their market cap barely moved.
- HenryKissinger 6y agoWindows remains the most popular operating system for computers by far, and that will never change.
- TylerE 6y agoI suppose that depends on how all gazillion AWS instances running Linux counts.
- rantwasp 6y agoAWS instances run Windows too. And MS makes money off those instances. Also, Azure runs Linux too. Microsoft is in the post-Windows phase and it's working on things that will keep it relevant long term
- bitwize 6y agoHe was played to an absolute T by John DiMaggio, the voice of Bender the robot, in Pirates of Silicon Valley.
- justapassenger 6y agoFunny to watch (if you’re into this type of humor). Horrible to work for.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y agoMichael Scott rules of management
- sharkweek 6y agoThe CONJOINED triangles of success!
- ackbar03 6y agoI don't think that's funny dude. The asshole with the bad ideas is in the ceo seat and he's your boss. I can't think of a less funnier employment situation. Kudos on him for having what it takes to actually bring it to life
- thanhhaimai 6y agoEh, I don't post often, but I have to reply this. Please don't normalize that behavior. It's not funny. That's like a bully. It's only acceptable for him to do that because of his position. Imagine a factory worker doing that to the CEO "just cause it's funny". That's the same with other funny-but-inappropriate behaviors we should discourage at work.
- npsomaratna 6y agoExactly. I cringed when I read that. I'd never treat one of my employees that way (or allow an employee of mine to treat a subordinate that way).
- warent 6y agoContext makes every difference here. I could very easily imagine some lower level employee doing this to a CEO and getting a laugh out of it. Context and relationship. EDIT: not that im saying Steve was in the right, who knows what their relationship was like
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aparsons 6y agoSteve hated it. Bill hated what it turned out to be by 1999 (I left around then). Dave Cutler hated it. Eric Engstrom saw it more as a defensive strategy. Microsoft poured an incredible amount of talent and resources that would have gone towards the Web into Xbox.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoConsidering what MS did to the web with the resources that were left over, it's possible the web had a lucky escape. Meanwhile Xbox has been a product driver - a big mostly positive influence on Windows gaming and on other platforms.
- pjmlp 6y agoFrom I am standing, with the Web turned into what is basically ChromeOS, I am not so sure how lucky it was.
- matthewdgreen 6y agoLosing the web is forgivable in retrospect: the web is a very big place and MS still has a very respectable Internet business thanks to Azure. What they can't be forgiven for is their focus on winning the living room rather than investing in mobile. If PocketPC had followed the same consumer/developer-centric trajectory as XBox, I think the mobile world would look very different today.
- rasz 6y agoBallmer is real life Todd Packer from The Office https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Todd_Packer https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Todd_Packer
- neilv 6y agoBack then, Microsoft had a reputation for ruthless and underhanded corporate behavior. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, were bad behavior also going on internally.
- xwdv 6y agoThe ends justified the means.
- hooloovoo_zoo 6y agoThis doesn't sound like a true story. He lies to Bill Gates 'telling him the console would incorporate the Windows operating system' but also had 'been telling them that [this doesn't need Windows at all] for two years.'
- mox1 6y agoSomeone gave a talk at my college early after the release of the original Xbox. It was definitely "Based" off of Windows 2000. So like I would call this a white-lie. Basically just the kernel and file system if I remember correctly. Kinda like how ios version 1 was based off OSX.
- valuearb 6y agoiOS was based off NextStep, just like OSX.
- grzm 6y agoCould you elaborate? I'd say any connection iOS has with NextStep is through OS X. What connection does iOS have to NextStep that is independent of OS X parentage?
- nailer 6y agoThe full article they link to clears this up. Indeed it's Windows 2000, but it's not "PC Compatible" which was the issue.
- est31 6y agoThe Xbox operating system does base on Windows though. It's just locked down in some areas and lacks some higher level builtin programs of Windows and has a different launcher/DE. It's a half-lie at most. Also, the parts of Windows that Xbox does ship with are the most important ones for Microsoft shareholders. Nobody would want to edit their documents from their Xbox. That would in fact be harmful because some people might not buy a proper PC then (as is observable years later with the advent of smartphones). But the Xbox uses the DirectX API as well as builds on all the Windows-isms. So if you built a game for Windows, it's not hard to port it to Xbox, and vice versa.
- klodolph 6y agoI’ve had coworkers who were on the original Xbox team and they told me that the OS was not Windows. One of the things about the Xbox OS is that the OS itself gets a fixed timeslice each frame to do whatever it needs while the game is running, in order to make it so the game can get the rest of the frame to run. This sounds to me like a decision that has far-reaching consequences. I’m sure that it shares plenty code with Windows. You might say that the OS is based on Windows. But it’s definitely not Windows.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoBy that standard, is a Hyper-V server running Windows? AFAIK, that's also just running NT as a guest.
- numpad0 6y agoI too remember the "Xbox kernel is not Windows" narratives in 2000s-2010s. Clearly Microsoft then considered it "not Windows", IIRC especially on Xbox 360. It's not that a VMM that reside parallel to the Xbox kernel makes it not Windows or not. Sometimes they said it's "built with technologies from Windows" or sometimes it was "built specifically for Xbox" but they maintained it's not Windows.
- pjmlp 6y agoYes, Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, Windows is just another guest OS.
- pupppet 6y ago>But look, the reality is that, again, you need to remember that this is a company that doesn't understand games, let alone consoles." ...so let’s make a game console?
- Iv 6y agoThe few games Microsoft did were actually pretty good. Age of Empire is still going on today.
- belval 6y agoAlmost 30k active daily users in a strategy game from 1999. That's a strong following for sure.
- turtlebits 6y agoMicrosoft didn't develop it, they just published 1 and 2 until they bought the development studio.
- hoten 6y agoIndeed... Steam says I've played 450 hours this year.
- ErikAugust 6y ago“ They had thought that before: 'Oh, we should make a Windows gaming platform – Windows will offer all these values...' Which is garbage, right? It's garbage, it is not true. No gamer gives a fuck about Windows features. But for the guys in Redmond, it was true. And you're not going to convince them. I mean, have you tried convincing your grandfather of something?” Ha. It seems like every big company is like this... blind to some obvious truths because of their massive success.
- zerof1l 6y agoThis website is so annoying with that autoplay video that keeps following me around the page
- dang 6y agoUrl changed from https://www.gamesradar.com/seamus-blackley-on-tricking-bill-gates-and-the-jedi-mind-tricks-that-were-needed-to-make-the-original-xbox/ https://www.gamesradar.com/seamus-blackley-on-tricking-bill-..., which points to this.
- cwyers 6y agoCould you change the title too, then, please? The new URL talks about this, but as part of a larger conversation.
- jennyyang 6y agoIt's funny how brilliant people like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were so intentionally stupid, because they were blinded by their own religion of "Everything Windows". It really makes you think how many others are blinded by this type of religious, dogmatic thought pattern. I'm sure there are many that we just don't hear about, including Zuckerberg, Pinchai, Musk, etc.
- echelon 6y agoI imagine that they see the market fitness landscape using the same perspective that helped them hill climb to where they are. It's one of the reasons why disruption is a thing. You might criticize this, but their perspective helped them punch through to where they are today. (Founders, at least. Not sure about hired CEOs like Pichai and Ballmer.)
- dfee 6y agoLeaders making decisions that are wrong (alongside plenty that were right) - well, that’s part of leading. Being called “intentionally stupid” on a message board - well, collect your points as they come, but I don’t buy it.
- grababner 6y ago'He tells us: "Eventually somebody would come back to you with your idea – they would say, 'Hey, you know, this doesn't need Windows at all'. And you have to control your urge to fucking kill them, because you've been telling them that for two years and now they finally come up with it like it's their idea. But that's the Jedi mind trick." ' OMG. I learned this a few years ago working in a corp environment with stubborn senior people with big egos. Basically, to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs. Sounds strange I know..
- siculars 6y agoThis is the way. L+1 thinking.
- hyperion2010 6y agoBenjamin Franklin.
- sneak 6y ago> to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs I forget where I read it, but I recall reading several times that this was how people at Apple had to present stuff to Steve Jobs to get him onboard with it. He'd initially dismiss it, then come back with the exact same idea as if it were his own. EDIT: According to this URL, it was from the Isaacson biography: https://www.nhbr.com/emulate-steve-jobs-with-your-eyes-open/ https://www.nhbr.com/emulate-steve-jobs-with-your-eyes-open/
- unishark 6y agoThat's what set Steve Jobs apart. Your typical executive could take months between rejecting your idea and proposing it as their own. But Jobs could compress this down to a week.
- oblio 6y agoI'm amazed how absolutely every character flaw Jobs had gets turned into a positive. If I had a nickel for how many times I've seen this happen on the internet, I'd be rich.
- aparsons 6y ago> "You'd have to sit in a meeting with Bill, and he's frighteningly brilliant. People throw around the word 'genius' all the time, and the way people say 'genius' is not accurate if you've met somebody who is a genius – somebody who, when you meet them, it seems like aliens are whispering in their ear because there's no way they could know these things otherwise. This is a different kind of a thing, and Bill's like that. This pretty much describes the guy. I was at Microsoft during the final years of BillG being very hands-on with most core products (pre-lawsuit). I really wish I had worked with him more, but here is my anecdote that speaks to the guy’s brilliance: My boss had gotten a fairly angry email from Bill sometime in 1995 if memory serves right. Chicago had taken much of his and Microsoft’s attention since the early 90s, that we didn’t see the internet coming. When it came, nobody was alarmed. Bill had apparently gone on a learning tour of sorts shortly afterwards, but most of the people in the industry knew nothing about what the internet made possible. We knew you could share documents, and it was growing fast, and that Bill thought it was important. Nobody “got” the internet, just like nobody “got” the power of controlling the OS before Microsoft. At the time, we were working on IIS (internet information service server) and a little behind schedule. Bill had also somehow caught wind of some Palo Alto startup talking to set top box companies to deliver an internet-connected OS (turned out to be WebTV, which we bought later) and was furious. Comes in, yells about how we can’t get the web resource model working, all that. Four letter words. Fairly typical angry boss rant. And then he collected himself and said something we thought was absurd - something akin to this: IIS and Internet Explorer will be Microsoft’s two most important products. We were struggling to get static HTML documents serving properly, and Bill goes on a monologue about how much of commerce will shift to the web, most video will be delivered online, we’d have free live video calling on handheld computers and the web as a platform would end Wintel. Thousands of machines running IIS that we could loan to web companies (sound familiar?). Bill understood no matter how far we got with Windows, the days of a platform tied to an OS were numbered - in the same time period that Windows 95 was selling like hotcakes. There is no other person I think who could analyze situations objectively like that. It’s like if Steve Jobs launched the iPhone 3G and a month later gives Apple a speech on how the iWatch will kill it. It was all absurd at the time - stuff of science fiction. Even a few years later during the dot com boom, much of it seemed far fetched. Then Android and Chrome, iPhone, M1, AWS, and Amazon all happened, and I realized Bill was right. It took a little longer than predicted, but every single laughable thing the guy said that day turned out to be true. I really do think if it wasn’t for the anti trust case, Bill would have seen a lot of this through - for better or worse. It’s easy to look back and say Microsoft lacked the vision to succeed in the internet age - and it’s almost true - but Bill had formulated all this in a few weeks of “exploration”. In a different universe, I think Microsoft abandons consumer Windows earlier than we can imagine, and builds “AWS” and “Chrome” around the IIS/IE combination. With reason to abandon the Wintel cash cow, IE may not have been so distastefully bad. Guess we’ll never find out though.
- Animats 6y agoThe original Xbox lost money over its entire life. It wasn't until the second generation that Microsoft moved into positive territory on that. Hardware had to get cheaper before a PC in a game console case was profitable.
- loosescrews 6y agoExcept the 2nd generation (Xbox 360) was the only Xbox that wasn't x86. It featured a 3.2 GHz PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon CPU [1]. It was also Microsoft's highest selling console ever [2]. Note that the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 each individually outsold it though. As a result, Microsoft has never outsold Sony with an x86 PC-like console, despite trying multiple times. Ironically, recent PlayStation consoles have been x86. Maybe Microsoft kind of won in the end? It still doesn't run Windows through, so maybe Microsoft was right from the start? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles#Home_game_consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- loosescrews 6y agoHas Xbox ever been profitable for Microsoft? The rumors I have always heard indicated that it wasn't [1]. Maybe it was worthwhile for protecting their Windows business, maybe they never should have bothered. Even if it is profitable now (I can't find any information one way or another), it doesn't seem like it turned out to be a worthwhile investment. Maybe Steve Ballmer was right? [1] https://www.cgmagonline.com/2017/08/14/microsofts-xbox-never-profitable-according-report/ https://www.cgmagonline.com/2017/08/14/microsofts-xbox-never...
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoTangent but I just launched the Halo Master Chief Collection from Steam on my Ubuntu Desktop using the Proton compatibility layer and it plays really well. So I can play every game in the halo series up to Halo 4 (including Reach and ODST) on my Linux machine! What a time to be alive!
- jsmith12673 6y agoIt's possible that Xbox serves as a loss-leader for introducing/keeping people in the brand. For kids who may only have chromebooks at school, and macs at home, an Xbox may be the first time they make a Microsoft account. That account then goes on to accumulate digital assets and stays with them until much later when they're ready to make bigger financial commitments. Anecdotally, for the past few years, gaming has been the only reason for me keep a Windows device around at all.
- rwallace 6y agoI have seen it claimed that, roughly speaking, - The sale price of the Xbox itself pays for the per-unit cost of the machine - The percentage Microsoft gets of the sale price of games, adds just about enough to pay for the development and marketing costs, so at that point, the business doesn't do much better than breaking even - But when you add in the ongoing revenue from online gaming, that's where the profit comes from Can anyone confirm or refute this?
- dfxm12 6y agoAfter start up costs (starting from scratch with the original Xbox was certainly more expensive than iterating to the current version), in general, consoles are loss leaders and you make up for them in rights fees from games (console makers traditionally do much better than breaking even here). Online services, like Xbox live gold, is another revenue stream. MS probably gets some value from more people getting Microsoft accounts, too.
- bennysonething 6y ago"world's most reviled software" Right, yeah, people hated Microsoft's software so much that they bought it by the bucket load. Also that comment about midway being problematic. Why is it problematic!? Did WW2 not happen? Who'd actually be offended?
- nikanj 6y agoThe usual suspects: Some white person from California who wasn’t even alive when the war happened
- irrational 6y agoDo they? I thought people just got windows with their PC and didn’t buy it. Lots of people use office at work, but I don’t know anyone that bought it personally. Google docs works fine for 99.9% of what people need office software for.
- bennysonething 6y agoOffice was and is so popular because it's better than the competition. Microsoft originally had hoped someone else would provide decent office type software. But it was crap so they wrote their own.
- irrational 6y agoWould MS have written their own if Google docs had been around back then (assuming we also had broadband Internet back then)?
- fulafel 6y agoThe secret to MS success was that they realised their main customers weren't the end users, but corporate IT and ISVs.
- Scapeghost 6y agoBoy Microsoft's software is the most pirated in the world. In my corner of the 3rd world and the countries around it many people have computers but almost nobody pays for software.
- holbrad 6y ago"Microsoft's choice of codename for the console project – Midway – was a deliberate statement, one that may seem problematic in a more enlightened age, referring as it does to the World War II battle in which US forces defeated the Japanese. " Hard to believe someone wrote that non-ironically...
- disgrunt 6y agoIt's sad that political correctness is mistaken for enlightenment.
- ReactiveJelly 6y agoActually it's super-easy to believe, barely an inconvenience. Wikipedia tells me 3,000 Japanese soldiers died in the Battle of Midway. [1] If I gloss over the fact that they were soldiers and not civilians, and ignore the injuries, in terms of one-day death toll, it's the same as 9/11. Sure, the Japanese military was the aggressor in WWII, but it seems rude to mention 3,000 human deaths for a cheap "take that!" I mean, the Confederates sure don't like it when we remind them that they lost the American Civil war. They were in the wrong, but they're still real sensitive about losing. In polite company I wouldn't mention it. [2] As an optional fun fact, Midway Games was probably using the same allegory when they picked their name. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_midway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_midway [2] The Internet, of course, not being polite. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Games
- mattnewton 6y ago> As an optional fun fact, Midway Games was probably using the same allegory when they picked their name. Really? I always thought this was because they were founded in Chicago, near Midway airport. (The airport itself was named after the battle though). Midway games got started in video games licensing games from japanese companies Taito and Namco, so I never thought about an adversarial explaination of the name.
- dfxm12 6y ago
- rmrfrmrf 6y agoMy takeaway is that this is a good example to keep in mind when considering architectural diversity, whether in software or hardware. Can your business take the hit if/when Apple/Microsoft/Amazon enter your industry, as a direct competitor, using your own platform and established userbase against you?