Alex Le’s Blog

I was reading Slashdot and stumbled into an article about XBox 360 and the execution behind it. It was quite amazing how Microsoft could pull it through. The article is available at Reed-Electronics.com website. Given the scale and the level of complexity of the project, only big names like Microsoft or IBM can have enough man power and capital to concert all activities. I always doubt the efficiency of big corporations, but after reading the article, my point of view has changed. This is actually a triumph of corporation-level execution.

BM assigned 421 engineers from six or seven sites to the project, which was a proving ground for its design services business. The effort paid off, with an early test chip that came out in August 2004. With that chip, Microsoft was able to begin debugging the operating system. ATI taped out its first design in September 2004, and IBM taped out its full chip in October 2004. Both chips ran game code early on, which was good, considering that it’s very hard to get chips working at all when they first come out of the factory.

421 engineers? IBM was pretty serious with Microsoft’s game plan and indeed the Xbox 360 scored big time when it was released. Thumbs up for Microsoft.

Oh, according to the article, Bill wanted to run Windows on XBox 360. Well, this can be done but why? I have 2 PCs and I consider that enough. If you want to add more multimedia features on the 360 then have the design the OS extensible to add more multimedia components. The hardware is good enough to handle multimedia for the next 3 to 5 years. Why do we need a bulky Windows XP in there? It’s not even instant-on, which is a major no-no for multimedia platforms. Moreover, I don’t want SPYWARE on my game console. Imagine while you’re playing Halo 3 (I hope) and those flashy “Free IPod” thing pops up. I’d love to “Kill Bill” right away.