A portion of a GamesIndustry interview with Microsoft's Phil Spencer...

GI: Was there anything in the other conferences though that stood out for you? People have said that SmartGlass is a reaction to the Wii U tablet. Is there any truth to that?

Phil Spencer: No, our SmartGlass was driven by the fact that people use multiple devices at home to consume content. Whether they're watching TV with their laptop up or sitting with their phone while browsing the web, we could use the power of Live to connect all these devices in an intelligent way and turn your TV into a smart TV. Your specific question on the other press briefings, I went to EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo and Sony and ours. Things that I thought and I am more of a positive than a negative; things I liked were ZombiU, they were nice enough to let me play. I thought that game played very well, and I saw the use of another screen and how that would work.

I think their Pro Controller makes a lot of sense with the platform they've built. They are building a platform that is effectively a 360 when you think of graphical capability. Now they are really making an on-ramp for the back catalog of games that are on 360. It is easy for those games to move over the Wii U. They've moved the buttons around, and they've made a controller that feels familiar for 360 gamers, so I get why they are putting those pieces together. I would have loved to see Zelda or Metroid or some of my favorite Nintendo franchises, which I didn't see.

For Sony, Sony has a big first-party. I didn't get a sense of what all their first-party studios are working on, but I thought God of War looked good. It's a franchise I like, I love the character and I think they do a good job with that. We are here to create entertainment, and we look at E3 and really wanted to create a breadth of content there. I felt good about how we showed up to really think about young, old, male, and female. We have more gamers than we ever have, whether they are on their phone, tablet, PC or console. We really want to embrace that huge community of gamers out there.