Engadget's interview with Bill Gates

Engadget got a chance to sit down with Bill Gates and talk a little bit about the new Xbox heres what he had to say:
"Thanks for taking the time to meet with me today. First off I wanted to ask you about the next Xbox console, which is arguably going to be the biggest Microsoft launch of the year. Why launch the console on MTV as opposed to E3? Do you risk alienating the original Xbox’s audience of hardcore gamers by going mass market from day one?
I’m going to call it Xenon, that’s the codename for the thing; Xenon is good enough that we’ll have no problem. Hardcore gamers are going to love Xenon because of the applications that are on Xenon. And it’s not just the technical specs. It’s the partnership we have with the game creators and we’re going to have this next generation machine out so that it’s going to be timed with high definition becoming very mainstream.
We’ve learned a lot from Xbox 1. In Xbox 1 we let ourselves sort of be second in and to not have the momentum. We had to learn a lot about building the partnerships. We’re new to the industry so people naturally didn’t know if we were hardcore committed to the thing. We’ve really gotten over that now and so it’s been a lot easier this time around, but we want to broaden video gaming, and without giving up any of the hardcore players we want more women, older people [to be playing games]. We’re going to have games that are more sociable, more approachable, particularly by taking this idea of Xbox Live and bringing in contests and spectators and ratings and talking to your friends and various new things there we think we can make it much bigger category than it’s ever been to date. That is important for us.
When the original Xbox came out it was widely thought that the inclusion of a hard drive is what gave the console a competitive edge over the PlayStation 2 and the GameCube. What is going to be the next Xbox’s competitive edge? Even though the PlayStation 3 is debuting later, it seems likely to include more advanced components like a Blu-ray drive.
That’ll be interesting to see. Sony is sort of committed to that, but if you look at the cost and complexities and timing of that, we’ll have to see. With the Xbox, remember what we’re delivering is the experience, and so when you have better tools, better software, and this better live experience where all your friends are up there on Live, that’s where you can connect to them and compete with them, it’s going to be pretty phenomenal. We want to have the best experience there, and we obviously saw with something like Halo 2 that when you get the pieces together it’s amazing the phenomena you can create around that. "
Read the rest of the interview over at Engadget.