Microsoft’s Albert Penello has said in an interview with MCV that he was “as surprised as anybody else was” when Sony announced the PlayStation 4 Pro, and that the Xbox One X was not a reaction to the upgraded PS4 hardware. He stressed that neither company has insight into each other’s plans and that the specs for Microsoft’s upcoming console were locked “years in advance.”
I give them a lot of credit for what they did there. But for me, the most interesting observation is that we both arrived at a similar idea even if the execution is slightly different. This business tends to diverge and converge in interesting ways, and obviously we don’t know what they’re doing. We don’t have insight into what their plans are, so when they announced the Pro, I was as surprised as anybody else was.
They had a different idea in mind for what they wanted to build, so in retrospect it may seem like we were reacting to what they were doing. But people in the business know that this has been in the works for years, and we have to lock the specs years in advance.
Penello added that Microsoft doesn’t “jump” on every new technology but “saw the 4K shift coming,” which is why it wanted to design a machine incorporating it.
[Source: MCV]
