Xbox
The original Xbox was released on November 15, 2001, in North America, February 22, 2002, in Japan, and March 14, 2002, in Australia and Europe. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market. As part of the sixth-generation of gaming, the Xbox competed with Sony's PlayStation 2, Sega's Dreamcast (which stopped American sales before the Xbox went on sale), and Nintendo's GameCube. The Xbox was the first console offered by an American company after the Atari Jaguar stopped sales in 1996. The name Xbox was derived from a contraction of "DirectX Box", a reference to Microsoft's graphics API, DirectX.
Xbox 360 launch
The console was also announced in Argentina in mid-2005, with "100% probability" that sales will begin in December 2006. But a year later, in May 2006, Microsoft pushed the launch date to December 2007. Still, it's very unlikely that Microsoft will actually sell their product in Argentina, considering the low sales of game consoles in the country: Sony introduced the PlayStation console in 2004 (almost 10 years after launch date in Japan), and a few months after that, the PlayStation 2, both costing twice as much as the "bootleg" imports, available in the country for years. Also, the price of the games is far from what the average gamer can afford, in the order of $100 to $180 USD, while PC game prices are adjusted, costing between $20 to $60 USD.