Original URL: http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2006/05/an_investigativ.html#trackback
Dean Takahashi, 01:01 AM in
Dean Takahashi,
Gaming
I've got a copy of an email about a project called Helium at Microsoft. The email came out a couple of years ago and it apparently describes an attempt to put Windows on the Xbox 360. It's one of the tidbits that I picked up while writing my book. If our collective consciousness on the web can be considered to be a "hive mind," I wonder if we can solve this mystery. Just what is, or was, Helium? Is it dead or postponed?
For the record, JonT is Jon Thomason, the former head of software for the Xbox team, sent this email to the whole Xbox group and he did not provide this email to me. The email is dated December, 2003. It describes how Helium has moved from investigation to a project. So what was it? I hear from my sources that this was the third SKU, the version of the Xbox 360 that ran Windows. It is the ultimate Trojan Horse in that respect. But Microsoft executives have consistently maintained that it makes no sense to make the game console into a full fledged PC. They reportedly canceled Helium. I hear that it was an idea they tried out to please Bill Gates' curiosity, but it never panned out. But I don't know that for sure. Is Helium something that we will see in the future? Will they save it for a high-end SKU later on? Will it be the 3.0 generation? Who can tell us? Who can speculate why it would make sense to come out with this kind of product?
I asked Peter Moore, head of Microsoft's game business, about putting Microsoft's plans for putting Windows on the Xbox 360 at E3. He said he hadn't gotten to that part of the book yet.
"You think about what we talked about in the Live Anywhere scenario and it's not device reliant," he said. "So whatever you run on your PC, on your 360, and your mobile phone, it's not about hardware and the operating system that sits on the console or the PC. Assuming it's the Xbox 360 OS. It's the Windows OS on the PC. It's not about the hardware. It's not necessary for us to do that to show progress. It's about the service. We talked about this for a long time. Hopefully Bill coming down to hammer that point home gives credence to the fact that we're very serious about this. Let's be clear only Microsoft could do this, put it all together on the platforms we built from the ground up."
I would note that one of the problems is memory. Windows Vista takes at least 512 megabytes to run. If you use up the memory in the machine to run Windows, what's left over to run games? Who would want a full-fledged Media Center PC on a game box?
From: Jon Thomason
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 2:42 PM
To: Xbox Platform FTE
Subject: Helium kicks off
Now that Helium has received formal approval, I want to announce that we’re making an organizational change.
Dwight Krossa will be reporting to me as Product Unit Manager on the Helium project. If you don’t know what Helium is, you’ll have to go ask Dwight J
He will be staffing a team to attack the substantial challenges around this and will
also work closely with Chris Pirich’s and Greg Gibson’s teams, who also have pieces of Helium to deliver.
I’m including here a note from Dwight about himself…not because he’s new to our
organization, but in kicking off this new role he will interact with a lot of
people who might not already know him:
My Life Before Helium: I have a BSCS from UC Irvine (focus on AI), and spend my
first years out of college developing voice recognition products. My career at
Microsoft started a long, long time ago, as the Build Manager for OS/2 (I have
lots of experience working with IBM). I then did tools development, writing the
OS/2 GUI equivalent to RAID and other internal tools. From there I moved to
marketing, helping to launch SQL Server and Lan Manager, then worked on Lan Manager for Unix (yes, Microsoft has actually sold UNIX products before), and was managing a product marketing team when we launched the first version of Windows NT Server.
I worked in Windows NT Server, Backoffice, and IIS, helping to launch and market all of these products as we battled OS/2, Novell, and Netscape. Have you noticed a trend? None of the products I worked on in my first 8 years at Microsoft made any money and had market dominant competitors. We eventually blew by all of these competitors. I feel right at home here in Xbox.
I then left marketing, going into Program Management for IIS. From there I did
business development for a couple of years, then moved to Developer division
product planning and then Windows server marketing, managing teams doing product planning and product marketing focusing on ISPs, Telcos and the application server platform. Last year I joined Xbox under Cameron as the Director of Random Projects, working on the Far East launch of Xbox and various investigations of new opportunities for the Xbox platform. And after a year one of those investigations is taking the next step, moving from investigation to development; Project Helium. If you don’t know what Project Helium is, stop by my office, breath the Helium, and I will explain it all.
Outside of work, my wife Nancy and I have two children Cody (9) and Ellie (6), who are very happy that I am in Xbox, because Xbox is a lot more fun to play with then a copy of Backoffice.
Please join me in welcoming Dwight to this new role!
-JonT
