In a recent interview with UK newspaper The Guardian, former Microsoft exec Peter Moore dishes the dirt on Xbox. According to Moore, the small 8GB hard drive included in the Xbox was what ultimately led Microsoft to prematurely pull the plug on the platform and introduce the Xbox 360 in 2005.[blockquote2]The hard drive in every Xbox killed us; we we're still selling it at $199 and the hard drive was like $70. That's why we prematurely left the original Xbox, because the more we were selling – there was still great demand – it was killing us, and there was no way to bring the price down. So in the end we determined at around the 25 million unit mark that we just needed to slow this thing down and just not sell any more, and move to the 360 as quickly as we possibly could. And to this day people still believe we left the Xbox too early but it was purely for financial purposes.[/blockquote2]Although I don't remember hard drives ever being that expensive back in the day, it's likely that the cost was so high due to the fact that 8GB was not a common hard drive size. Which means, Microsoft had to pay more to get the drives produced.
Peter Moore Interview: Part Three [The Guardian]
