ABSTRACT
Consumer marketing at Microsoft was comparatively new. Microsoft had experience marketing to corporate accounts, but less experience with marketing to individual consumer demographics, and almost none at marketing for the video game crowd. Beth Featherstone had joined Microsoft in 1991 as an international product manager in the hardware division. She was later promoted to worldwide group marketing manager. Featherstone became a group marketing manager for PC games just before the launch of Age of Empires, and quickly discovered that the group she was taking over was sorely in need of supervision—and a good deal of reorganization. Don Coyner eventually left the marketing team to work directly under J Allard. One specific area in which Coyner played a major role was in retaining a great degree of control over the Xbox message. Bob McBreen remembers one of Coyner’s observations in the early days that helped shut people down who wanted to add unnecessary pet features to the console. “.
