The June issue of Wired has an article on J Allard, the Xbox 360, and the big picture. Learn all about the method and the madness, the enigma that is J:
Allard is not exactly your typical Microsoft employee. Spend a bit of time with the man and you begin to see him as a wag on the loose inside the Microsoft campus, saying and doing his own thing regardless of whether it jibes with corporate strategy. He uses an Apple PowerBook, fires off rambling, profanity-laced emails to his superiors, and has a knack for, well, thinking different. He also has the respect of Gates and Ballmer.
So when Allard cooked up another unlikely proposal in 1999, his bosses paid attention. Ballmer remembers thinking that Allard’s proposal was over-the-top. “Bill called me up and said, ‘Let’s get this thing fired up.’ I said, ‘Um, this is pretty different, pretty bold.’ Actually, ‘wacky’ was probably more like it,” Ballmer remembers. “I didn’t say, ‘Stop,’ but I pushed back pretty hard. There’s no way to muscle in on guys like Sony and Nintendo using just sheer resources.”
Microsoft was always the company to push beyond the realm of boldness into “wacky”. Windows ME, for example.
Is the 360 a not-veiled-at-all attempt to take over the living room? J Allard is appalled at such a suggestion.
I ask Allard whether his book-sized memo outlines a broader strategy featuring Xbox 360 as a Trojan horse that sneaks Windows into the living room entertainment stack. It seems like a reasonable question. At $150 each, PS2 and Xbox are already cheap ways to kill two home-entertainment must-haves with one stone. But Allard recoils at the very suggestion. He looks like he’s about to curse, but then composes himself enough to answer my query. “If there’s a serious gamer out there who doesn’t get an Xbox console because a mom who wants to watch DVDs grabbed the last one, then we’ve failed,” he says.
Take note, moms, J’s on our side, and he plays for keeps.
Two criticisms of the article:
- The reporter seemed to dance around the issue for the entire length of the article, on the trail of getting the important questions answered and sifting through the secrets and lies once and for all. What am I talking about? You know what I’m talking about.
- What, no love for the Reginator? Allard may look like Michael Stipe but Reggie looks like he can benchpress a mid-sized sedan.
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