Stringer: Xbox 360 is an ‘Obsession’
In a lively interview with the Wall Street Journal, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer compliments Bill Gates’ salesmanship and unintentionally reveals his preoccupation with the Xbox 360.
The WSJ conducted the interview in front of an audience at the publication’s D: All Things Digital conference last week, where the Sony boss inadvertently revealed his own fixation with the videogames market.
When talking up the box office sales of Sony’s Da Vinci Code movie, Stringer said, "It also beat Xbox 3 in Europe in its second weekend," at which point WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg corrected, "You mean X-Men 3." Laughing, Stringer retorted, "There’s an obsession!"
When the interview’s topic switched to videogames and Xbox, Stringer said, "God I walked into that, didn’t I … Look, the skill of Bill Gates is he’s so brilliant at his detail that when he slips in the salesmanship, most of us think: oh my God, he must be right. … He talked on the one hand, and I loved it, he talked about [Windows] Vista [being] delayed as if the delay was normal, and then he started mocking me for delaying PS3 [PlayStation 3]."
