A closer look
Microsoft executives faced an absolutely brutal internal review meeting in 2000 where Bill Gates aggressively screamed at the original Xbox development team, repeatedly calling their prototype a complete insult to everything he had built. Gates was furiously livid because the proposed gaming console was not running a standard version of the Windows operating system, which he viewed as a severe strategic betrayal of the company's core software philosophy. The meeting lasted for hours of intense corporate yelling until an executive finally pointed out that if Microsoft did not launch the console, Sony would completely dominate the living room media space forever. Faced with the terrifying prospect of losing market share to a Japanese electronics rival, Gates instantly dropped his philosophical software objections, greenlit the massive hardware budget, and inadvertently birthed the toxic voice chats of Halo multiplayer
