Peter Moore: HDD in the original Xbox 'killed' us

In an interview with UK newspaper The Guardian, former Xbox head Peter Moore (now at EA Sports) admitted that the 10GB hard disk drive in the original Xbox contributed to the console's early demise, as well as Microsoft's decision to omit the HDD from the Xbox 360:

And in the same way, not having a hard drive in every Xbox 360 was a hard decision, but we wanted to get price under control. 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.

In the interview Moore also discusses his feelings on Rare and the reaction from other Microsoft employees when the Xbox Game Division was created. Part 4 of the interview was posted today, in the latest interview Moore mentions the RRoD fiasco and how he had to walk a fine line when dealing with press about the topic. He also went into detail on his decision to leave Microsoft for EA Sports, as well as Microsoft's first reaction to the Wii's unusual Wiimote controller:

"What the hell is that?...The Revolution as it was called, we knew it couldn't be anything powerful. It was in the days when Sony and ourselves were saying it's all about hi-def, it's all about 5.1 sound, it's all about 1080i, and they said it's about a GameCube 1.5 and you're going to wave this stick around and have a lot of fun."