Microsoft's Don Mattrick vs. Sony's Kaz Hirai
Five questions we asked the pair of them.
Is your question "do we have innovation?" I think Live's a great example of that. Microsoft is a company that thinks in long lead times, it has the ability to invest, it has the ability to stay committed to a category, it thinks globally, so those are pretty amazing attributes.
The other thing I think that we've shown as a company is we can deliver new functionality, new value and increased accessibility through the new Xbox experience [interface]. That's never been done in the history of videogames - someone delivers a brand new experience through software that makes their core experience more functional, more dynamic, more accessible and kind of recognises the unbridled growth that we've made in the category. I think that's a leadership stance.
When you think about the prior generations, usually the first company to get to 10 million units has a pretty great business and we were the first to achieve that. The company that creates the best financial ecosystem for content partners, a place where content partners can make profit and grow and scale their business, that tends to win.
When you add up hardware, attach rate, software sales, Live usage, all of those things are there and what I really give this team a tremendous amount of credit for is they're just going into their ninth year. Think about what any other consumer electronics company or entertainment company achieved in their first nine years and then compare it to what Microsoft has achieved. I can tell you that Microsoft has brought more innovation, more great experiences, more software, more innovation than anyone. Period. People kind of lose track of that - that we have a vision; that we're committed to the space and every year we stay we get better.
In relation to Europe, we just had Chris Lewis lead and take on responsibility for our business as it relates to Europe in a dedicated manner. That was in March, so we've got lots of desires for growth and I think our team's doing a great job. We had a record year last year as a business. We went from a loss to a profit, which is a pretty important milestone, and we're anticipating the industry's going to have record growth out in front of it, and we're going to have record growth out in front of us.
If you look back at the history of our business - whether it's PSone, PS2, PS3 or PSP - it's pretty much the situation where we've decided where we want to go, and provided the content and services to make sure it gets us there. There haven't been too many instances where people can point to us and say: "Aha!" It's been pretty much all original, whether we're talking about the way we architect the hardware, the peripherals, as well as content and services as well.
Obviously with games we have first-person shooters, so I guess somebody can point to that and say it's not original, but I think that's taking it to the extreme, and I don't think that's where you were going with it. But there haven't been too many instances that I could really point to that says we're basically just following whoever else is going into the market with something that resonates, and then we follow along.
Even a great example would be that there's been all this talk about casual gaming, social gaming, and all that good stuff - that's true to a certain extent and I don't deny that, but quite honestly it's something that we've been doing since about year six of the PlayStation 2. And unless we've been successful in the casual gaming market, you don't get to nine years and 130 million units - because you've got to appeal to the real light users at that point in time. So casual and social gaming? Yep, been there, done that and we have a pretty good track record. The input device may not be so eye-catching, but the numbers speak for themselves.