ABSTRACT
J Allard had gained considerable notoriety and respect at Microsoft as the guy who had clued Bill Gates into the importance of the internet, but after working on internet issues for years, Allard decided to leave on a long sabbatical. Allard returned to Microsoft in August 1999 and had lunch with Steve Ballmer. Allard and Cam Ferroni were convinced that getting from millions to billions, as he had told Ballmer, required that Microsoft build the hardware themselves and collect royalties from the games. A lot of people were engaged in the search for solutions through research, while others were looking for answers outside the Microsoft campus. Behind the scenes, most of the original xBox team were also convinced that a Microsoft console system was the only way to go. All the early Xbox hardware demos used Windows 9x machines that booted straight into the front end using AMD chips and NVidia graphics cards in a normal PCI slot.
