I'm off to the Consumer Electronics Show this week, so I'm shamelessly and indefensibly shirking my trivia responsibilities yet again. To fill the void, here's some tech-toy themed minutia from my old Geek Trivia columns:
While Bill Gates may have a personal wealth that dwarfs the gross national product of many third-world countries, and Microsoft boasts a cash flow that would make some state revenue cabinets envious, jumping headlong into the multibillion-dollar gaming hardware market was still quite a daring leap for a software company. The man who convinced Gates and, perhaps more important, Steve Ballmer to get in the game, so to speak, was Xbox development chief J Allard. ...
Allard drew his inspiration for the Xbox 360 not just from more traditional sources of product development and market research, but also from science fiction—including a noted sci-fi novel that Allard made required reading for his entire Xbox 360 development team.
WHAT SCIENCE-FICTION NOVEL DID XBOX 360 DEVELOPMENT CHIEF J ALLARD REQUIRE HIS TEAM MEMBERS TO READ?
