A decade later, the former chief Xbox officer revisits his critical decisions

Microsoft lost $5 billion to $7 billion on the original Xbox, launched in 2001. And it made billions of dollars on the Xbox 360. Depending on the time frame in which you look at it, it was either an insane waste of money or the finest strategic decision that Microsoft ever made.

Robbie Bach had to make the call to do it or not. He was the chief Xbox officer from 2000 to 2010. He went forward, and I chronicled the results in two books, one about the making of the original Xbox and another about the making of the Xbox 360. I never got a chance to see the video game business from Bach’s bird’s-eye perspective. I didn’t know, for instance, that he almost quit in 2001, and he even wrote a long resignation letter after a disastrous first revelation of the original Xbox. He has written Xbox Revisited, a memoir of his time at Microsoft as well as his strategy for fixing our country’s problems.