Microsoft's next Xbox gen "too early to tell", wants to

While the corporate giant has said it’s too soon to be talking about the next generation of consoles, Robbie Bach does however want to be first in the door again.

Getting the Xbox360 first on the scene ”has given us a leg up in a number of places that are super important.” Obvious math but will lessons be learnt for next time?

”The last cycle for the original Xbox was a little shorter than typical (at four years). We started way late,” Robbie Bach of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Device Devision said in an interview with VentureBeat.

”If you take the question of whether it was the right thing to try to be first, the answer to that is definitely yes.”

”It has given us a leg up with game developers. It has given us a leg up from an economics perspective. It helped us expand Xbox Live quickly. At a strategy level, if you asked if we wanted to be first again, I would say yes.”

The transition from strategy to implementation is the key to success or failure, it paid off in the end for Microsoft but it came with a significant price and a lot of headaches on either side of the counter. Will Sony let another generation take up the Xbox banner first?

”People ask me how many people I have working on the next generation. On the one hand, it’s everybody. On the other, it’s nobody. People are continuously working on new technology,” he continued.