Dave Cutler, considered by some as the father of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, has joined the company's Interactive Entertainment Business group to work on the Xbox 360.
The veteran software engineer, who Microsoft describes as "the key technical brain behind the 50 million lines of code constituting [Windows]," is tasked with helping grow the video game console into a home entertainment device -- a key goal for the company in recent years.
Microsoft has made the Xbox 360's multimedia capabilities a tenet of the console by offering film/TV streaming services like Hulu and Netflix, partnering with entertainment content providers like HBO and Last.fm, and emphasizing non-gaming uses for its motion/voice-control peripheral Kinect.
At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, the company's CEO Steve Ballmer touted the console's transformation into an entertainment hub and
proclaimed that the Xbox 360 is "still [about] games. ... but [it's] morphing, changing."
Prior to joining the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live division, Cutler led the development of Windows NT, which released in 1993 and has since served as the base for all subsequent releases of the operating system. He's also worked on Microsoft's cloud-based Azure Services Platform.
