ABSTRACT
The 1999 version of Microsoft’s yearly executive offsite retreat provided a key moment in the history of Microsoft’s move toward a game console, but few people recognized its significance in the moment, and, although several people recall it, their memories are expressed with slightly different inflections. Rick Thompson, who joined Microsoft in 1987 and became the head of the Hardware Division in 1995, recalls the open space process a little differently. As the executive retreat, Microsoft split the Windows division into separate enterprise and consumer divisions, and consumer Windows was given the task of figuring out what kinds of devices, platforms, or influences the industry to produce, that would make the consumer Windows identity successful. According to Nat Brown, who had already been researching solutions to the problem of sub-$500 devices, one proposal on the consumer side was to create specialty Windows-based PCs.
