Xbox "has a shot at owning the living room"

At VentureBeat's MobileBeat 2012 conference today, Xbox president Don Mattrick and Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon took to the stage to talk about gaming and Microsoft's Xbox brand. Gordon insisted that the brand and Xbox Live are Microsoft's big winners, comparing Xbox Live to Apple's iTunes.

"Microsoft has to try to make Xbox live the real crossover service for all gamers. Nobody's done a game network as well as Xbox…in fact, iTunes and Xbox are two of the biggest successes in the consumer Internet," he said. "Xbox needs to be a platform like Office or Windows."

"Google owns eyeballs. Apple owns ears and fingertips. With Xbox, Microsoft has a shot at owning the living room," Gordon added.

Mattrick mentioned that Xbox SmartGlass was integral to the platform's continued growth. He also confirmed to VentureBeat that Halo 4 would connect to the Microsoft Surface tablet using SmartGlass.

"In the past five years, Xbox went from number three to number one [in the home video-game console race], and we took Xbox Live from nothing to north of 40 million users," Mattrick said.

"With Smart Glass we'll add a very simple idea: context and intelligence and sharing between different devices."