14 DAY TRIAL // J Allard Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Design and Development, Entertainment and Devices Division is featured in both of the images collaged in the adjacent picture. On the right, you will be able to see the clean-cut J Allard in charge of Zune development over at Microsoft, while on the right, showcasing a new look with dreads is also Allard, but after he has lost a bet to Newsweek's N'Gai Croal in 2005.
N'Gai and Allard had dinner together almost two years ago, just six weeks after Sony had made available PlayStation Portable in North America. "As the dinner discussion turned to the new Sony system, it was clear that N'Gai was still a PSP enthusiast. I was far less bullish on the PSP's market acceptance... I didn't understand their UMD movie push or why the studios would follow. I questioned their decision to use optical media because of the impact on battery and production costs. I was skeptical of the size of the product as a music player. As always, it was a fun debate as we pushed back and forth on the issues. At one point N'Gai declared, "the PSP is so good, it will sell faster than PS2" and with that, the gauntlet had been thrown down," Allard recalled.
Allard enumerated some of the qualities of PSP, among which the incredible specs, and the green screen, and while he was sure that the device will sell by the millions he never expected customer demand to outweigh that of the PS2. And this was his downfall.
"We set the 10-million-unit mark as the deciding point. Well, N'Gai called it. In October 2005, Sony announced that they had surpassed 10 million units sold after only 10 months of commercial availability. He had me beat. The thing is, he never got to cash in on the wager. In 2006, I had shifted my focus to a new project called Zune, didn't present at E3 the annual games conference and I had forgotten about the challenge. He reminded me a couple weeks back that I never made good on the bet so here are the promised dreads - 360 days after the last E3 Xbox press conference," Allard revealed.
And as a result, the official bio page of Allard over at Microsoft was changed according to the bet he lost. Feast your eyes on the brand new look of the Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Design and Development, Entertainment and Devices Division as you can see him in the image towards the bottom.
