Xbox almost didn’t exist! Bill Gates hated it at first until someone asked him: What about Sony?

Video game consoles were completely new territory for Microsoft and it seemed obvious to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer that the project made no sense. They were going to lose money, and it was expensive, and their business was different. They spent hours in a meeting, and then someone asked the question that changed everything: What about Sony?

Ed Fries, one of the creators of Xbox, recalls:

Four in the afternoon, Valentine's Day.  invoice [Gates] He walks into the meeting with our Xbox presentation on paper, slams it on the table and says: This is an insult to everything you've done at this company.

This happened in the initial meeting to try to impress Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer It was worth creating a video game console.
Fries told the story in an exclusive interview with IGN Unfiltered a few years ago, and this excerpt was picked up by Microsoft CEO Steve Sinofsky at Twitter.  In these excerpts the origin of the Xbox is condensed What was but what may not be.

Bill Gates didn't like the idea of ​​Xbox
The meeting was attended by Ed Fries, J.  Allard, Robbie Bach, and of course Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, who totally opposed the project.  The meeting dragged on, and hours passed—"It was Valentine's Day, most of us had plans," Fries recalls.
They had been working on the project for a year with the team that created the concept—Kevin Bacchus, Seamus Blakely, Ted Hussey, and Otto Birx—and were convinced that Xbox development and production was the right strategy.  They always said, But Gates and Palmer still miss the mark..  At this point, a person who participated in the meeting as an "observer" intervened.  He raised his hand and asked, "What about Sonny?".

This analyst, whose job it was to write articles and reviews, had the following thought:

Sony is gradually invading the living room.  The processor on one side, the memory on the other, and the hard disk on the other.  If you put it all together, it could be a threat to Microsoft.

The billion dollar question
The question "What about Sony?"  Stop Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.  Then Gates turned to the team and said:

Guys, I'll give you whatever you want.  I will agree to the plan, I will let you do what you want, I will give you all the resources you need, and you will be separate from the rest of the company so that no one will interfere.

Who hated the Gates and Palmer project He ended up fully supporting him.  "Five minutes later we were out," laughs Fries.

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