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New J Allard Interview at AE

Mr Nash

square pies = communism
Random quotes ahoy!

http://www.armchairempire.com/Interviews/j-allard-xbox-360.htm

Q: What went wrong in Japan and what are you doing to correct it for 360?

Allard: We didn’t have a team in place. We didn’t have a game plan that was rock solid. We didn’t take into account their needs in terms of the brand, the industrial design. The portfolio was very limited. We didn’t have the world’s best game developers and publisher support that we needed in Japan. And we weren’t differentiated. We also had a two-year disadvantage. [PS2] I think, launched in March of 2000, and we launched in February of 2002. That was another bad thing. They’re not getting a head start this time, that’s for sure. We’ve got the world’s best game publishers onboard. We’ve got the most creative, well-known developers onboard, which will bring more developers onboard. We’ve incorporated the regional feedback in terms of the name, in terms of the brand, in terms of the aesthetic qualities of the box. And the capabilities of the box, especially on gaming. And we’ve got a great team in place there now. It’s battle-scarred but very eager to get going.

Q: Is there a cultural acceptance of an outside company coming in and trying to claim the market, versus the “home court advantage” of [Sony and Nintendo].

Allard: I would grant the advantage more to Sony in the sense that Mr. Kutaragi visits all the publishers very regularly. And [they] can have very active dialogue, which means the people responsible for creating the platform between the people that are creating the games. And Mr. Kutaragi may have wanted the executives making the decisions in Japan their hitch for the PlayStation business. The executive team from Redmond makes lots of journeys over to Japan to make sure that we’re visible and to take feedback on our licenses there. At the same time, what has Microsoft done for them? We don’t have the background with them. We haven’t helped advance their companies. Everyone, I would say, has been very flattering to us in terms of us advancing the industry and they like the innovation and they like what we’re doing with Xbox 360 but what have we done for them? They are running businesses, so there is that advantage there that Sony holds that… the good news is, that this next generation the score is zero zero.

Q: What do you think about Sony’s hardware?

Allard: I think they’ve mislead people being very specific about certain numbers in the press conference on Monday. We’re launching a product campaign, they’re launching a political campaign. They were clearly responsive to the system that we’ve designed. At the end of the day, our transistor count and their transistor count – about the same. Then you have to dig to the next level. We have a unified memory architecture. We didn’t tell developers how to split it, [Sony] split it. Every one of our developers might split it right down the middle but who knows. In terms of through-put and performance, they talk about 2X the floating point performance. That’s not right. They neglected to mention that we have about 3X integer performance. They further neglected to mention that 80% of games construction mix is integer and 20% is floating point so when you weight it out, we’ve actually tuned it a little bit better. In the end, it’s basically a wash. I look at it and say it’s a wash. You can make the case for us, you can make the case for them. We’ll publish a bunch of details so you guys can all speculate but it’s basically a wash. But I can say there’s will be harder to program for. And we’re going to have better software support. Both of these machines are so sophisticated that theoretical performance doesn’t matter – what matters is how much of that performance can be unlocked. The key to unlocking performance [of the hardware] is software.
 
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