GDC: Microsoft's John Schappert

Here's a lesson we take, which I don't think we learnt from them, which is never run out of stock in January. I think the takeaway is we did better than expected over the holiday in America, we were in a sold-out situation, and now we don't have stock at the stores, which allowed them [Sony] to sell more units in January than we sold.

By the way, that's the first time since the launch of that platform that that's happened. We've always outsold them two to one at least every month since they launched. Our hindsight - and hindsight's always 20:20 - is we wish we knew how many units we were going to sell, so we didn't have the stock situation we have right now. It should be remedied by March.

What we didn't announce is, we didn't say 'hey, here's the new game store'. That's not the announcement that we heard. What we did say is that XNA is a great cross-platform development environment. Before, you could download for free, develop on the PC, make your game on PC any way that you wanted, and you could then join our Creators Club, download that and now put that game on your Xbox 360. It's great cross-platform; very portable. What we then showed is that now we have a third platform that we're working on the API to roll out in a future Game Studio release. So we can't do that right now, but in future that will be a third platform you can develop games for. I would strongly urge you to call on the Zune people.

I think you're right actually.

I don't know the particulars of when British Telecom will be launching that. I can say that it is way cool. It is awesome. I wish, as a North American, that I could have access to that. We talk about things in North America that you don't have in Europe - that is something you're going to have that I wish I had! The Guide is cool, the ability to record shows is cool. It's just really great. The software's there, so it's a matter of working to the particulars, but it's really neat.

I don't know what the plans are on that. It was a low attach rate. It wasn't one of the high-selling accessories if you will. The people who bought it knew what they were buying. What I will say is that I think it circles back - it's about a gaming machine we have that actually is the best gaming machine out there, which plays 7 of the 10 top-rated games, has the highest attach rate in history of 7 games purchased per console.

We wanted to offer people a choice -

I don't think we have any comment on that right now or any plans, but my focus is I'd rather give you community gaming and contribute to more games you can play and focus on the fact that you're walking in, you're buying that box and it plays great games and has the best online service. I think the fact that it does movies and sometimes TV shows in other territories is great but not the primary reason.

What I'll say is we have nothing to comment there. We have no plans to announce or anything like that right now. But I'd also urge you to look at the attach rate for the HD-DVD drive.

It was a 3 percent attach rate. So again, when you're saying 'the obvious thing', you also have to take into account how did the other accessory do when you look at the future. We have nothing to comment right now on that and my focus is how we make Live better, how we get more great games and how do we empower the community. That's what I wake up and think about, and it keeps me awful busy.

I've not.