Peter Moore Blows Lid on PR Handling

In the fourth part of a Guardian interview Peter Moore, currently head of EA Sports and former Xbox boss talks about the gentle art of Corporate Bollocks Talking.

"No, I never said what I wanted to say”, he tells Keith Stuart (who has to be congratulated on an excellent set of interviews). “Within whatever I say, there's a messaging framework, I might say it in a more flamboyant way but there's a messaging framework that I'm usually very careful to adhere to otherwise my handlers would roll over me."

So, at last a senior executive admits to not saying what he thinks. Frankly, it makes you wonder why on earth there's a layer of senior executives getting in the way of the marketing and PR messaging in the first place.

Moore also spoke about how Microsoft underestimated the Wii. Discussing his first sight of the Wii (or Revolution, as it was then called), Moore said, “The GameCube had pretty much failed. I was in Tokyo when Iwata-san brought the controller out and said, 'here it is!' and we were all going, 'what the hell is that?''. I was with Robbie (Bach - head of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division) and I remember going "I don't know… it's different".

“But we knew that they were too good a company to lose twice in a row. But even then it was all about Sony, it was not about Nintendo, because they were so down and out – it's very difficult to think now, it was four years ago”."

Moore also stated that it was not the Red Ring of Death problem, which exploded not long before he left Microsoft, that drove him from the company. “It was unfortunate because as this was going on the Red Ring of Death story broke and so for better or worse the belief was that I'd been pushed out because of the hardware problems – that was not the case at all. But it was unfortunate timing”, Moore said.

You can read the full and excellent Guardian interview here.