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About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Friday, December 24, 2004Bungie's Jump into the Big LeaguesBusiness Week has a great example of what passes for analysis these days. Too bad this guy doesn't know squat about Microsoft or the game industry:Like many fast-growing, hair-on-fire startups, Bungie has the feel of a frat house. The average employee is just 29, and only two are women. The close-knit staffers practically live in the big, cluttered room that passes for an office, working and hanging out until all hours of the night. They survive on delivery food, and think about nothing but video games. The only difference? This irreverent bunch happens to reside smack dab in the middle of Microsoft's corporate headquarters.Fascinating. Too bad it's irrelevant. Any group at Microsoft--be it Bungie/Xbox, MSN, the Windows team, or the Office team--that develops a dominant or strategically important product can call its own shots. If you wrote a story like this about MSN, the language would be exactly the same. "This irreverent bunch happens to reside smack dab in the middle of Microsoft's corporate headquarters." Yeah, just like the MSN guys. Same thing. In fact, that's how the NT team started, and now they're runing the show at Microsoft. This is how Microsoft operates. Today, Bungie and most of the Xbox guys at MS can write their own ticket despite the fact that the Xbox is hemorrhaging cash. That's because Gates loves them, and they get an all-access hall pass as a result. That has nothing to do with them being an "irreverent bunch" of guys. You know what the real story here is? How much bigger Halo and Halo 2 would have been if they had only shipped for the PlayStation 2. The answer? Much bigger. [ Posted at 10:14 AM | Permalink ]
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