hands on the 360

[pApA SmerF01]

here's a blog i found about steve ballmer's impression of the 360:

Hands On the Xbox 360 - Sticking it to Ballmer

So yesterday was a big day here in Redmond. We had two events going on simultaneously, the Windows Vista launch party and the Microsoft Technology Fair for new grads and interns. I missed the Vista party, so I didn't get one of the cool hats everyone was walking around with. I chose to go to the technology fair since Steve Ballmer would be there. Plus it was fun to see this again through the eyes of a full time employee, listening to all the interns rant about either how great Microsoft is and why they want to come back full time, or rant about how stupid Microsoft is and how they are going to take their phat resume down the street to Google.

I listened to Steve Ballmer's talk, and then I did get the chance to get to the microphone to stick a question to Steve Ballmer about Microsoft being able to innovate when so many things (backwards compatibility, customers wanting small changes not revolutions, etc.) hold us back and cause us to cut a lot of things at the drawing table. Windows Vista is great, and I am still impressed by its speed and power in Beta 1, but many of the revolutionary changes aren't where they should be. Some great change is still coming in Beta 2, but Windows Vista in the end will be an evolution, not a revolution. Maybe creating a revolution just isn't possible anymore (and for the Apple fans that read the site, no, OS X is not a revolution. OS X is a 10 year old OS with class and solid design caused by small but fast evolutions). He gave me an answer about continuing to improve our engineering process, but I guess I was left wanting more. I still think Steve is an awesome CEO who isn't given enough credit for what he brings to Microsoft every day. I also extremely appreciated how he handled one of the event planners who announced that he had time for only one more question, and Steve basically responded by saying, "Nope, I'll make the time to answer everyone's questions who are standing at the microphones even if it makes my wife mad for being late."

The other advantage of missing the Windows Vista event is that I spent plenty of time touching and playing with the Xbox 360! The controllers feel awesome! They are just a bit smaller than the current Xbox S controller and a whole lot better fitting in your hands in my opinion. The "blade" menu that they have been showing off is just slick. The fact that you can do that on top of any game without interruption in most cases is awesome. The Xbox 360 case is small, sleek, and damn sexy. I am convinced that I like it a lot more than the Playstation 3 case, especially after seeing it. I won't say much more than that out of fear of the Microsoft gods destroying me for telling you guys and gals too much. Let's just say this, with Sony talking about stellar price points and limited supplies, I wonder how they will compete with a globally released console that will be hitting its second year stride when the PS3 is released. I did keep a couple of program manager business cards, so hopefully I can bombard them with e-mail about all the great strategy ideas we have been talking about here on the site. Maybe I will just send them a link to the blog with a summary list of ideas to give them an idea of some of the great suggestions many of you have had/talked about.

here's the link:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/jeromeontech/Blog/cns!1p-jTa0g3LlkmfZHpjXBlqXw!298/PersonalSpace.aspx

[citizen X]

Wow things just keeps adding up against SONY and the PS3