For the record, JonT is Jon Thomason, the former head of software for the Xbox team. He sent this email to the whole Xbox group and he did not provide this email to me. The email is dated December, 2003. It describes how Helium has moved from investigation to a project. So what was it? I hear from my sources that this was the third SKU, the version of the Xbox 360 that ran Windows. It is the ultimate Trojan Horse in that respect. But Microsoft executives have consistently maintained that it makes no sense to make the game console into a full fledged PC. They reportedly canceled Helium. I hear that it was an idea they tried out to please Bill Gates' curiosity, but it never panned out. But I don't know that for sure. Is Helium something that we will see in the future? Will they save it for a high-end SKU later on? Will it be the 3.0 generation? Who can tell us? Who can speculate why it would make sense to come out with this kind of product?

From: Jon Thomason
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 2:42 PM
To: Xbox Platform FTE
Subject: Helium kicks off
Now that Helium has received formal approval, I want to announce that we’re making an organizational change.

Dwight Krossa will be reporting to me as Product Unit Manager on the Helium project. If you don’t know what Helium is, you’ll have to go ask Dwight J

He will be staffing a team to attack the substantial challenges around this and will also work closely with Chris Pirich’s and Greg Gibson’s teams, who also have pieces of Helium to deliver.

I’m including here a note from Dwight about himself…not because he’s new to our organization, but in kicking off this new role he will interact with a lot of people who might not already know him:

My Life Before Helium: I have a BSCS from UC Irvine (focus on AI), and spend my first years out of college developing voice recognition products. My career at Microsoft started a long, long time ago, as the Build Manager for OS/2 (I have lots of experience working with IBM). I then did tools development, writing the OS/2 GUI equivalent to RAID and other internal tools. From there I moved to marketing, helping to launch SQL Server and Lan Manager, then worked on Lan Manager for Unix (yes, Microsoft has actually sold UNIX products before), and was managing a product marketing team when we launched the first version of Windows NT Server.

I worked in Windows NT Server, Backoffice, and IIS, helping to launch and market all of these products as we battled OS/2, Novell, and Netscape. Have you noticed a trend? None of the products I worked on in my first 8 years at Microsoft made any money and had market dominant competitors. We eventually blew by all of these competitors. I feel right at home here in Xbox.

I then left marketing, going into Program Management for IIS. From there I did business development for a couple of years, then moved to Developer division product planning and then Windows server marketing, managing teams doing product planning and product marketing focusing on ISPs, Telcos and the application server platform. Last year I joined Xbox under Cameron as the Director of Random Projects, working on the Far East launch of Xbox and various investigations of new opportunities for the Xbox platform. And after a year one of those investigations is taking the next step, moving from investigation to development; Project Helium. If you don’t know what Project Helium is, stop by my office, breath the Helium, and I will explain it all.

Outside of work, my wife Nancy and I have two children Cody (9) and Ellie (6), who are very happy that I am in Xbox, because Xbox is a lot more fun to play with then a copy of Backoffice.

Please join me in welcoming Dwight to this new role!

-JonT

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