More great interviews

Here's a great interview of J. Allard (every one that I've read has been great, though).

Q: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 … there have been rumblings about which system is technically superior. How does the hardware compare?

A: I think that basically [Sony] mislead people who were very specific about certain numbers in the press conference on Monday. We're launching a product campaign, they're launching a political campaign.

You can kind of go through it, and guys have completely torn it apart. In the end, it's basically a wash. You can make the case for us; you can make the case for them. We'll publish a whole bunch of details and you guys can speculate, but it's basically a wash.

What I can say is theirs will be harder to program for. And we're going to have better software support. Both of these machines are so sophisticated that theoretical performance doesn't matter. What matters is how much of the performance you can unlock, and the key to unlock performance is hardware/software.

J. Allard is such a down-to-earth guy that it's hard to think of him as being Microsoft's corporate VP. I've played with him on Xbox Live a bunch of times (he's a busy guy, so in the ~2 and a half years he's been on my friends list, he's rarely online). We've talked about things and he's very open and intelligent (this also comes through in all of his interviews). I respect this man very much and am glad that he decided to take on gaming. He is a gamer at heart and he listens to the community. He's a realist and a visionary at the same time. He's also very respectful of his competition and his allies (something one can't say for Sony). ;) He's not your typical exec.

There are MANY other similar excellent interviews I'm thinking of putting into this post (possibly at a later date).