QUESTION (engadget.com): I know that in the past you’ve indicated that Microsoft wasn’t planning to introduce a competitor into the portable gaming space, but has your position changed at all? What would make Microsoft get into portable gaming?
Answer (Bill Gates): Right now our entertainment group is very focused on Xenon and doing an absolutely fantastic job on Xenon, and it’s very exciting to see how that is coming together. In the portable space you have to think of okay what will the phone become over time. The phone is sort of trumps everything. It trumps media players, it trumps cameras, it trumps GPS-mapping devices, digital wallets, and even entertainment. And obviously we’re in the phone software space. We have partners who build the hardware there. And so I’m not sure that you’ll ever see us do something that’s a game-only device. I think you’ll see us do flavors of the phone that are better for gaming and have an affinity to PC gaming and Xenon gaming, but and we’re doing a bit of that now. Nothing dramatic. We see a generation of phones coming that really can do this without too much compromising being available in the two to four year time frame. So at least in that sense we’ll roll out some portable gaming. Right now we don’t see a dedicated device on our road map. |
