Monday, May 16, 2005

Somehow humanity's most famous nerd has become kind of cool.

It's a decent metaphor for what Microsoft is trying to do in making the Xbox 360. Microsoft, known more for its bullying business tactics than its technological innovation, is trying to act in a very un-Microsoft fashion. It's trying to be quick and nimble, radically innovative, and play well with others. It's trying to reinvent itself from the corporate DNA on up.

Gates and his team have spent the past 3-1/2 years working in obsessive secrecy to build the greatest piece of game-playing hardware the world has yet seen. And they don't want to sell it just to a niche audience: they're gunning for all of us.

The Xbox 360 will be out around Thanksgiving; Sony and Nintendo are expected to follow with consoles of their own in 2006.

[Microsoft] knew the new Xbox had to look kinder and gentler [than the original Xbox]. The goal was a design that was welcoming but not wimpy, that snagged the soccer moms and NASCAR dads and Britney girls—without losing the Halo boys.

It's sleeker and slimmer than the old Xbox ... It's also a little feminine—there's a hint of an hourglass figure. There are very few cables because the controllers are wireless. It has chrome accents, but it's mostly a creamy, calming off-white that the color geniuses call chill. And if you don't like chill, it has a snap-off faceplate, so you can customize it.

There is a wow factor to the Xbox 360 because it's the first console for which all the games will be in high definition, wide screen, with Dolby 5.1 surround sound. It's like putting on a pair of glasses: everything is clearer and sharper and more vivid ... The fidelity is disconcerting: it gives you a vertiginous feeling, as if you were going to fall into the screen and come out in Narnia.

Tthe next version of Halo will not, repeat not, be ready in time for the launch of Xbox 360. It will be part of the all-important second wave next spring. "It's perfect," Gates says, radiant with bloodlust. "The day Sony launches [the new PlayStation], and they walk right into Halo 3." Microsoft is expected to announce that Xbox 360 will play Halo 2 and other Xbox games.

Let's not miss what's happening here. Microsoft, a company known primarily for making highly profitable business software, has put a box in your living room. It entered your house under the humble pretense of being a game machine, a toy for the kids, but it just ate your CD player and your DVD player, and it's looking hungrily at your telephone. It's all up in your media cabinet. It's talking to your iPod, your digital camera, your TV, your stereo, your PC, your credit card and the Internet. It has created a miniature electronic ecosystem inside your home, with itself at the center.

Games are just the condiment. This is the main course, and it's what Gates is really after. Games just get you in the door.

The final step in the process has nothing to do with what's inside the Xbox: Microsoft will have to make it cool. In addition to giving it that iPod-esque design, Peter Moore will run a very hip, very un-Microsoft ad campaign featuring quirky hipsters wearing the Xbox logo.

If it seems incredible to you that, a year from now, there could an Xbox 360 in your living room—or a PlayStation3 or a Nintendo whatever-they're-calling-it—and that you could be using it to videoconference with your brand-new gamer buddies while grooving on a Mahler symphony, think of all those iPod owners who, five years ago, didn't know what an MP3 was. Jaded as we are, the future can still surprise us. It might just be both nerdier—and cooler—than anybody expected.