Bill Gates he is a wise man. Not in vain is he one of the richest people in the world, one of the subjects who defined the course of the technology industry and one of the few ahead of his time who predicted what the Covid-19 pandemic would be like years before it happened.
Year after year, Bill Gates is regularly consulted on countless topics and he is never afraid to share his opinion, no matter how harsh or unaccommodating it may be.
Such a situation has led to curious cases and incidents in his career, such as the recent aversion and lawsuit that arises between this boy and the richest man in the world: Elon Musk.
Bill Gates’ judgment has proven sound and sharp on more than one occasion. His life history confirms this. But it is also true that he is not infallible. In fact he once almost made a mistake that was going to cost him a monumental fortune.
Bill Gates, the Xbox and a mistake that almost cost him billions of dollars
The daily ace has rescued one of the most curious, crooked and delicate episodes in the public life of Bill Gates. All seen from the perspective of the present, where Microsoft’s Xbox business division today is worth close to $15 billion in annual revenue.
This sounds like a brutal business that the company has managed to appropriate a good segment of the market. But the reality is that at the time Bill Gates did not want to approve the creation of this line dedicated to the creation of consoles and video games.
The newspaper rescues how six years ago in an interview for IGN Ed Fries, co-creator of Xbox, shared all the details about an incident called by them as “The Valentine’s Day Massacre”, where Gates was about to remove the project from the console permanently.
It all happened in 2001, the project of the Xbox It was already early, but both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were not very convinced with the progress. In fact, both had as a central point of doubt and dispute the operating system that the console would run, since it could well be considered in the end as a PC assembled in the form of a console.
Bill Gates then wanted the Xbox to run on an adapted version of Windows, but when running his calculations they discovered that it would not be a feasible business, the only way was to create a closed system and thereby go against the wishes of the co-founder of Microsoft.
On Valentine’s Day, a meeting was held to reveal this unexpected twist to Ballmer and Gates, under the frank possibility of throwing the entire project in the trash.
Bill didn’t take the announcement lightly, calling the Xbox launch plan an “insult” and Ballmer backing down about the amount of money they could lose. But there was one factor that changed the outcome of the story: Sony.
The company had begun to get into the hardware market with the development of the CELL chip that would end up being the heart of the PlayStation 3.
That project set off alarm bells within Microsoft, and both Ballmer and Gates ended up approving the launch of the Xbox as a preventative measure.
In the end, the fear that Sony might start to meddle in the hardware and software market led Bill Gates to launch the Xbox.