Henson’s office is among the warrens of one-person cuboids in Millennium Campus, one of Microsoft’s many complexes scattered around Redmond, a suburb of Seattle. Lacking a desk, lit by kitschy lamps and arranged around a small TV stand, it’s quite unlike any office you’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s more like a living room. He reflects back at the size of the team – just ten in the earliest days – that established the service. Now, Xbox Live has swollen to require a staff of some 400 people.

But with the core gamer market in the US pretty much wrapped up and PS3 snapping at Xbox 360’s heels in every territory, Microsoft needs to extend its console’s reach. And it’s looking to Europe to do that. Later, when we meet John Schappert, vice president of Live, software and services, he calls Europe the Xbox’s new ‘battleground’ for good reason: 360 sales there have long trailed those in the US, despite Europe’s larger population. With the PlayStation brand retaining strong cachet, Xbox 360 routinely sells the fewest consoles each week in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, even if it has a much stronger presence in the UK. And Live, the main differentiator between Xbox 360 and PS3, will be the way to do it.

“The gameplay style in Europe is more casual, more collaborative and social,” Henson says. “They’re a key part of us getting the next 20 million on the service. We’re asking how we become something that’s relevant to everyone. I think Europe is the North Star, the sign that says ‘here’s what it looks like to broaden the service to everyone’.” On this most carefully orchestrated of visits, where every meeting runs exactly to time and every attendee is perfectly prepared and on-message, Henson, warmly genial though he is, is performing a routine that establishes Live as the foundation stone upon which Xbox 360’s fortunes will rest.



When Schappert (right) came onto the stage to presenti Xbox 360’s new dashboard, at E3 it was an expected move – the absence of the traditional spring update hadn’t gone unnoticed – but the style is quite a departure from the jellybean-hued blades of the current system.

But, when we see it in the office of Marc Whitten (left) , the head of Xbox Live, it makes complete sense. Compared to PS3’s pristine XMB, an interface inherited from Sony’s PSX DVR-and-PS2 combination and seen on high-end Wega TVs, the blades strongly betray their gaming roots. In place of the XMB’s stark high-fidelity flicks are the blades’ dramatic swooshes. Rather than the XMB’s simple and balanced presentation of all PS3 does – music, video, games, online – the blades obscure Xbox 360’s functions. In experienced hands the blades are efficient, but Microsoft has identified them as inhibiting Xbox 360’s appeal among non-gamers. And Marketplace, in particular, is creaking with the volume of content that’s available.

“Because of the amount of stuff that’s coming into Live, it’s actually a little difficult for people to find it, especially people outside the core users,” admits Whitten. “It’s based on this idea that you know exactly what you want to do: hit the eject button, put the disc in, go to multiplayer and start playing your Halo match. That’s the way it’s always worked. That worked super well for the cognoscenti of the console world, but the truth is that there’s an amazing amount of content that for a lot of people is hard to find.”

The new dashboard, therefore, strikes out in a different direction. “The idea is to move toward this channel metaphor, so you can see at a glance the types of things that I can do on my box, to make these things much more relevant about me,” Whitten explains.

Options, arranged laterally, are spread over a number of channels that are arranged vertically. The channels include My Xbox, which broadly serves up what’s on the console and the player profile in the manner of the current blades. Community shows friends and information about them; Game gives access to the games Marketplace as well as stored demos and XBLA titles; Video does the same for videos; Spotlight is an advertising-cum-network guide channel.