Halo 3 will be a 'super great product'

Microsoft chief Bill Gates has been speaking about Halo 3 for Xbox 360 and believes that it will be a "super great product."

Bill also revealed that Bungie will be given all the time it needs to make the intergalactic FPS a killer-app for Xbox 360.

"It's up to the team when it wants to ship Halo 3 and it's going to take its time to make the game a super great product. So even we don't know when it will come out," he toldEngadget.com.

He also took time to discuss the upcoming hardware battle between Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and believes Microsoft's experience in the area of online gaming with the original Xbox Live will be key.

"We learned about contests and spectators, and so this is really a second generation of Live for us ... it's based on software expertise, so it will be interesting to see what Sony does in that dimension."

Gates remains bullish about the performance of Xbox 360, despite the present shortages stating that he is certain that Microsoft will have a substantially higher share of the market in this generation than it did in the last.

It's also worth noting that this representsan official about-facefrom Gates' statement in an interview with Time magazine last May, in which he declared "It's perfect ... The day Sony launches [PlayStation 3], and they walk right into Halo 3." We'd heard Microsoft's Xbox honcho Peter Moore backpedal fromGates' earlierstatementalready, but it was interesting to hear it from Gates himself as well.