In May 2004, Microsoft hosted a small dinner at Morton's steakhouse in downtown Los Angeles for a handful of journalists attending that year's E3 trade show in Los Angeles. The Xbox side included J Allard, Xbox Live marketing manager Aaron Greenberg, and PR maven David Hufford.

So fueled by the liquid courage of Morton's finest Cabernet, we gentlemen decided on a friendly wager. The bet: whether the PSP would reach worldwide shipments of 10 million units within the same 12 month span of time it had taken the PS2, give or take 3 months. We took the pro; Allard, the con. If we were correct and the PSP hit its mark, Allard would wear a dreadlock wig for the entire month of May, including the week of E3 2006. But if Allard were right and the PSP missed our agreed-upon milestone, he would get to shave our dreads. Onstage. During the Xbox E3 2006 press conference. In front of 1,500 attendees. (Did we mention that wine was involved?)

During a September 2004 interview with Kutaragi in his Tokyo offices, Molly Smith, then head of U.S. PR, asked us to tell her boss of our wager. We did. He chuckled. We asked him whether he thought our six-year-old dreads would be safe from the covetous Allard. He looked us dead in the eyes and said "Yes." And just ten months after the PSP's December launch in Japan, Kutaragi was proven correct, leaving our prized dreads intact.

You can imagine our surprise, then, when the month of May 2006--including E3--came and went with nary a sighting of Allard in the agreed-upon dread wig. Nevertheless, the hard-charging, mountain bike-riding, Whistler-snowboarding, hipster chic-sporting Allard has always struck us as an honorable fellow, and we have every confidence that he'll live up to the terms of his wager...eventually. In the meantime, we congratulate the elusive Allard on his Business Week cover.

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