“Four o’clock in the afternoon, Valentine’s Day. Bill [Gates] he walks into the meeting with our paper presentation of the Xbox, throws it on the table and says, ‘This is an insult to everything I’ve been doing at this company.’” Ed Fries, one of the creators of the Xbox, the initial meeting to try to convince Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer that was it worth creating a video game console.
This was totally new ground for Microsoft, and both Gates and Ballmer seemed to be clear that the project did not make any sense. They were going to lose money, it was going to be expensive, their business was different, said Ballmer. They spent hours together, and then someone asked the question that changed everything. That question was: “what about Sony?”.
The trillion dollar question
Ed Fries told the story in a special interview on IGN Unfiltered years ago, and these days those fragments were rescued by Steve Sinofsky —former Microsoft manager— On twitter. in those fragments condensed the origin of an Xbox that was but could not have been.
And part 1 pic.twitter.com/APpNJvU3d2
— Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi) June 26, 2021
Present at that meeting were Ed Fries along with J. Allard, Robbie Bach and, of course, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, who totally opposed the project.
The meeting dragged on: the hours passed—”and it was Valentine’s Day, most of us had plans,” Fries recalled—and they kept trying. convince Gates and Ballmer of that.
They had been working on the project for a year with the team that had created the concept—Kevin Bachus, Seamus Blackley, Ted Hase, and Otto Berkes—and they were convinced that developing and producing the Xbox was the right strategy. They kept saying it, but Gates and Ballmer still didn’t see the point of it.
Part 2 pic.twitter.com/H0fGagQybe
— Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi) June 26, 2021
That’s when he stepped in a person who had attended the meeting as an “observer”. She raised her hand and asked “what about Sony?”.
IGN posted this Xbox history clip on TikTok. pic.twitter.com/xS0gD3q2q4
— Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi) June 26, 2021
That analyst, whose job was to write documents and analyses, raised the question. “Sony is gradually invading the living room. Processor on one side, memory on the other, hard drive on the other. If they put it all together, that could be a threat to Microsoft.”
That question of “what about Sony?” made Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer stop. That’s when they looked at each other and Gates said, “yes, what about sony?“, and Ballmer repeated the same thoughtfully.
They then looked at each other again, and Gates turned to the team to say, “Guys, I’m going to give you everything you want. I’m going to approve the plan, I’m going to let you do what you want, I’m going to give you all the necessary resources, you’re going to be separated from the rest of the company so nobody interferes.”
Of hating the project, Gates and Ballmer ended up fully supporting him. All after a question that came at around 8 in the afternoon. “Five minutes later we were out,” Fries said with a laugh.
The rest, as they say, is history.
