Interview with Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft

- There are going to be some more surprises on the hardware end?
Could be! Look, for us to say we’re going to go through a whole generation without an HD capacity drive—I think that would be naive to assume that we’ll be sitting here at the end of the Xbox 360 generation and no such device will have shipped. On the other hand, we haven’t announced anything, Sony’s announced something, and who knows? You know, they could have announced support for Beta instead of VHS. We’re trying to watch and really be agile on our feet, relative to the issues between HD DVD and Blu-ray. As a platform provider we’re trying to make sure our software standards are well-supported in both places. As the provider of the Xbox, we’re sitting there saying, “Look, we’re shipping NOW.” This was not an option. Neither one of these things were an option for our first shipment, so it’s kind of a moot point. Sony’s saying, “Who knows what the standards are, but we’re going to commit to what we’re going to commit to.” I think we can be nimble and agile and that’ll be important.

- Regarding backwards compatibility, it seems like that’s going to be on a kind of a selective basis from what we gather—is that correct? We are working very hard to get compatibility. Of course the prioritization in our technical work is in the leading selling games from the first generation, just like the PS2 didn’t run all PS1 games, it is unlikely we’ll ever be able to say the 360 will run all Xbox 1 games. I think there are some games if we get them to run that means many, many other games will run, and I think rather than give some statement that is either too conservative (because the engineers can do better), or a bold statement we can’t live up to, we thought we’d make our strategy clear that as we get further down the road and as our engineers do more work, the execution will speak for itself.

- Are there going to be multiple configurations for the box? Will there be version with a built in TV Tuner and an expanded hard drive? [laughing] We love the one configuration we’ve announced and we’re creative guys and I think you’re creative guys and so the notion that there might some day be other configuration is eminently possible. It’s a little bit like the discussion about HD DVD type storage. Will we have it? Sure. It’s not like by the next generation there won’t be a way to get massive storage on an Xbox. You’ll get it. And there will be other configurations that come to market. When and how and exactly which ones… when there’s news I’m sure we’ll be happy to trumpet those. Right now we love our one configuration that we got in market for this Holiday.