As part of the latest Inner Circle podcast, Xbox executive Aaron Greenberg fielded numerous questions about the Xbox One, one of which had to do with launch timing. For the first time in two console generations, rival Xbox and PlayStation consoles were released in the same year. But the interviewer wondered: did the Xbox One launch too early? Did it launch in November 2013 only to ensure Microsoft wouldn’t give Sony’s PlayStation 4 a one-year advantage in the market?

“I don’t think so,” Greenberg said. “We had to launch head-to-head with them. We didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t know what we were doing. You assume they’re going to do some things; you get some right and some wrong. But we were pretty focused. The titles we had in development, whether it was Forza 5 or Ryse or any of our launch titles, we felt like we were ready.”

“We were trying to do a lot more–if you think about Kinect and voice and TV integration” — Greenberg

Greenberg also says that the Xbox One was actually “more ambitious” than the PS4 through its Kinect, voice, and TV integration. This came at a price, as the Xbox One–which originally came bundled with Kinect–was $500 at launch, compared to $400 for the PS4, which offers an optional camera. Microsoft has since dropped the Xbox One price multiple times; the system is available today starting at $350.

“We were trying to do a lot more–if you think about Kinect and voice and TV integration,” Greenberg said. “We had perhaps a more ambitious vision. But with that said, no, no one has ever said that we shouldn’t have launched [when we did]. That we didn’t feel like that was the right time and place. We’re off to a good start, but we have a lot more work to do. We never regretted or felt like we weren’t ready.”

The original Xbox launched in 2001, one year after the PlayStation 2. Meanwhile, the Xbox 360 was released in November 2005, a year before the launch of the PlayStation 3.

“So this is the first time we’ve ever gone head-to-head at the same time, so it’s just a different dynamic,” Greenberg said. “We saw what it was like being a year late, we saw what it was like being a year early, and now we’re in a whole different space.”

Sony is winning the early sales race, as the PS4 has sold more than 18.5 million units, compared to somewhere north of 10 million units for the Xbox One. As Microsoft has said numerous times in the past, however, this console generation is a marathon, not a sprint.