Interesting article. However, a lot of the comments by Bachus come across as saying, "it's their fault, not ours." He mostly sounds like a guy trying to shift the idea of failure away from his end. The other people quoted in the piece seem more willing to be honest about the problems on both sides.
The part that stood out for me was this: "Many meetings and dinners later, a meeting in the US at E3 2003 was arranged. Microsoft and Square executives sat down to discuss Final Fantasy 11. From the off it was a disaster. “I had gone through a lot of work to set up this meeting,” Fries says. “I just sat there and watched it fall apart. There was a whole bunch of American attitude to the meeting, and the Japanese did not appreciate it.
“It was like watching a train wreck. It was like watching all this work I had done just fall apart.”"
With Microsoft, you had the guys in Japan telling the Japanese gaming industry one thing, doing it the right way, but the decisions themselves were still coming from the main offices in the US. I imagine that a lot of Japanese business people got offended one way or another during that initial period. You don't force your way in with the Japanese or wave money that them and you don't throw rigid rules at them from the start. Those kinds of power plays work fine in the US but not in Japan or even in many other places in the world. I think this "we make the rules" attitude is why Microsoft is a brand looked on with suspicion in a lot of countries.
