The Original Xbox “Pissed Off” Bill Gates

Those who remember Microsoft’s first console as the “DirectX Box” probably already know why. The Xbox was meant to be a Windows machine, but it turned out to be something quite different.

…Gates and Ballmer gave the Xbox team $500 million in project funding and a blessing. But a year after the Xbox project was underway, none of the promised code was making it back to the Windows team. And "it made Bill very, very pissed off," Brown recalls. "There was not a lot of shared code. It's very frustrating," he says.

Interesting that they were so closed source, it was also between divisions.

A lot of major corporations are disfunctional like that.

*Shrug* My Xbox original still works fine.

Spidey329 said:

Interesting that they were so closed source, it was also between divisions.

A lot of major corporations are disfunctional like that.

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my company isnt that major and we are definitely like that. super duper silo-ed.

Understandable if something was promised after giving a team 500 million dollars, and a year later they still haven't delivered. But I'm sure no one there now is complaining

ManofGod said:

*Shrug* My Xbox original still works fine.

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It's kind of sad that my original Xbox is still alive after ~12 years while my xbox 360 died within 2 years due to RROD and is now dead again, even though I didn't use it much for the past 3 years.

Pretty ironic in a way that it's going to be windows 10 that is going to be the version that is shovelled onto every xbox one. I hate windows 10 and that alone is what would push me into buying a ps4 if I were console buying.

You guys built a potato without a mouse and keyboard.. like this is gonna sell!

Nettwerk said:

You guys built a potato without a mouse and keyboard.. like this is gonna sell!

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millions of people would disagree with you about games consoles.

dangerouseddy said:

millions of people would disagree with you about games consoles.

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Agreed. Consoles have their place and have provided millions with a memorable experience.

What I love is that Consoles supplies memories to people of things they more than likely did with other friends at the same time with a lower cost of entry than computers ever would.

While I'm a pc gamer, and spend most of my time upgrading pc parts. I rmember my hey day of importing sega saturn games, playing chrono trigger/final fantasy vi/etc til 5am in the morning, and thousand of hours spent on the dreamcast really well.

The xbox was a success, and no amount of me spending thousands on a pc to make my E peen bigger is gonna take that fact away.

trentchau said:

Agreed. Consoles have their place and have provided millions with a memorable experience.

What I love is that Consoles supplies memories to people of things they more than likely did with other friends at the same time with a lower cost of entry than computers ever would.

While I'm a pc gamer, and spend most of my time upgrading pc parts. I rmember my hey day of importing sega saturn games, playing chrono trigger/final fantasy vi/etc til 5am in the morning, and thousand of hours spent on the dreamcast really well.

The xbox was a success, and no amount of me spending thousands on a pc to make my E peen bigger is gonna take that fact away.

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All the power, none of the responsibility... Its not that they werent successful, its what their success brought that is the problem. In their success they poisoned some pretty sacred PC gaming tenets.

Spire3660 said:

All the power, none of the responsibility... Its not that they werent successful, its what their success brought that is the problem. In their success they poisoned some pretty sacred PC gaming tenets.

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If you don't mind me asking what did they poison? This is kinda news to me. (I'll admit being pretty ignorant to this).

maademperor said:

my company isnt that major and we are definitely like that. super duper silo-ed.

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Yep. Internal competition isn't always a good thing. Hits morale and bottom line in many cases. It's a useful tool for partial splits but not big key divisions and decisions like . I know a lot of companies suffer from this sort of setup.

Whoops. Meant big decision like making Xbox how it was done for example. Early submission of posts is a common cause for not making sense, I hear!

trentchau said:

If you don't mind me asking what did they poison? This is kinda news to me. (I'll admit being pretty ignorant to this).

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Microsoft wasn't content creating a platform for casual gamers,they did all they could to cripple and discourage PC gaming,and other console companies followed suit. Console exclusives,horrible PC ports (just look at the debacle with the latest Batman game),little effort given in developing pure PC only games. All their talk about increasing support and development in the PC gaming area has been empty lip service.

michael.pa2 said:

Microsoft wasn't content creating a platform for casual gamers,they did all they could to cripple and discourage PC gaming,and other console companies followed suit. Console exclusives,horrible PC ports (just look at the debacle with the latest Batman game),little effort given in developing pure PC only games. All their talk about increasing support and development in the PC gaming area has been empty lip service.

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I guess it is much easier to blame consoles than the developer about that Arkham Knight game, eh? I have not bought the game but I would rather have it on my XBox One. Only reason I would by it for my PC is if it was cheap so I could play it a 4k res.

michael.pa2 said:

Microsoft wasn't content creating a platform for casual gamers,they did all they could to cripple and discourage PC gaming,and other console companies followed suit. Console exclusives,horrible PC ports (just look at the debacle with the latest Batman game),little effort given in developing pure PC only games. All their talk about increasing support and development in the PC gaming area has been empty lip service.

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So strange that was all going on before the Xbox. Guess it is just easier to blame the big bad M$ boogie man.

trentchau said:

If you don't mind me asking what did they poison? This is kinda news to me. (I'll admit being pretty ignorant to this).

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Prior to the Xbox, Microsoft was publishing a lot of PC gaming development. Dungeon Siege, Fury 3, The Neverhood, Asheron's Call, Midtown Madness, Mechwarrior, etc. Then Xbox arrived and that all went away. We got Flight Simulator, that was about it. Instead of developing both branches, the Xbox completely cannibalized their PC gaming effort. And as someone stated, they gave us empty statement after statement about revitalizing their PC gaming efforts. What we got was Games for Windows Live. Additionally, titles like Alan Wake, which started development as a PC titles, was bought out by Microsoft to become an Xbox exclusive. The only reason it even came to PC years later was because the original devs wanted to release it so badly and the exclusivity contract finally expired. It took PC gaming a long time to recover from MS's total about-face.

Climber said:

So strange that was all going on before the Xbox. Guess it is just easier to blame the big bad M$ boogie man.

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Please. Windows was and still is THE premiere operating system for PC gaming. Their passive-aggressive attitude towards it has held it back. Look at how bifurcating DX10 with Vista helped speed things along. It only took about 7 years after DX10 before we started seeing titles that actually required something higher than DX9 because the rift was so bad. Meanwhile, we had DX9 exclusive games, what, 1 year after its release? I personally would have liked the PC gaming platform to be run by a company that didn't want PC gaming to die quietly so they could sell more Xbox's. It would be like if Sony decided that they were no longer going to develop games for the Playstation and just focus on making Nintendo titles instead. Yes, exclusives have sucked for reasons prior to Xbox, but MS has been and still is in a unique position to fuck with PC gaming.

When moving into off campus housing, my last year in college, my original Xbox fell out of a box and went end over end slamming into stair after stair all the way to the basement .... It is still working today.

Climber said:

So strange that was all going on before the Xbox. Guess it is just easier to blame the big bad M$ boogie man.

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Games for Windows Live. If there was every something that was meant to totally fuck up PC gaming it was that. I've never hated something so much in my life. Updates nearly every time you fired up a game and you had to take it in order to continue playing which meant closing the game and waiting 5 minutes for it to update and half the time required a restart! Yeah I'll always see GFWL as a Microsoft wrench thrown into PC gaming. I just thank God its dead and that there weren't that many games (that I play anyway) that used it. It truly was an abomination.