Having worked on Xbox Live since its inception in 2002 and headed up the software team that created the new 360 dashboard, Jerry Johnson has just taken a new role as general manager of Xbox Live Europe. It’s part of Microsoft’s new emphasis on catering directly to the European market instead of leading it all the way from Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters. We met to talk about how he intends to make Xbox 360 more attractive to the complex tapestry of cultures that make up – in VP of Live, software and services John Schappert’s words – Xbox 360’s new ‘battleground’.

You’ve just been brought across to head Live in Europe – is this a brand new role?
It’s part of this commitment to Xbox Live. We’re going to be a smaller group – I was heading about 140 software people at Redmond, but this is about 30. We’re not bringing 30 Americans over to do this, it’s going to be me and a senior engineer coming over and we’ll hire people from continental Europe and the UK with the goal of creating experiences that are very appropriate to the European market. Last week I was in Spain and it’s clear that you can’t build experiences for Europe from the United States. It just doesn’t work – it doesn’t have the right flair, the right perception – whatever you call it.

Is it a visual thing, or a content thing?
I think it’s very much a content thing; it’s an experience thing more than anything. You go into southern Europe and it’s sports and social aspects that are the most important. One of the things we’ve always been asked the most is: “Why doesn’t Xbox Live have matchmatching by country?” And our answer is that this doesn’t help you find people – if you start to limit your audiences when you’re having trouble finding enough people, filtering it down more doesn’t help you get a group together. So we’re going do some things that go after the social aspects.  I don’t know what the answers are – whether it’s things that tie together interests that are relevant to each market to allow people to do social things together, or heatmaps. We’ll build apps into the dashboard that will do this, because the dashboard is no longer static.

So these would fit into the dashboard as new slots?
Yep – not to draw too much of a parallel, but think about what we did for Netflix in the US. That was a separate application, something that shows up as a slot and downloads on first use, and geared specifically to the US market. When we come over here we can pick out certain pieces of content, certain social activities that we’ll be able to go off and make specifically for this market. When you think about games, Rare has a lot of interest in this too, you have entertainment experiences and games. What Live allows you to do is bring these two things together and wrap social experiences around them. You’ll start to see some crossovers that aren’t really games and aren’t really entertainment. We’ve the opportunity to use all the changes we’ve made to the platform and make some things for the market over here, and we don’t have to wait for Redmond to make them a priority.

Can these apps be made by external companies as well as your team?
Yes – we’ll have an engineering staff here and also be working with some partners. Netflix and the photo sharing app are examples: Netflix was done internally, and we asked a company in San Diego to make the photo app. We had to open up the API to some elements that we don’t allow games to access, so we had to work in partnership. I think you’ll see both those models.

Will these apps ever cost users money?
As a business we make money through transactions, subscriptions and advertising, so whenever we bring content on we evaluate how it will drive customer behaviour. If it encourages people to get on the service and do other things, maybe we’ll make it free. If it’s niche or requires licensing rights, it could be transaction-based.

The new dashboard runs very smoothly, even with the amount of additional media that it has to download – did you ever fear that you wouldn’t be able to achieve that?
Yeah! There were times I couldn’t sleep because I didn’t know that we were going to be able to pull this off this year. We were worried about performance from the get-go, especially with all the graphics we wanted. If you look at other stores on consoles – think pictures popping in when you’re trying to browse content – we realised that doesn’t fly. We spent a lot of time concentrating on pre- and predictive caching, so as soon as we’re connected you’re getting stuff. It mustn’t impact anything else that’s going on, but we wanted there to be no waiting for stuff to pop in. It was nerve-wracking.