To clarify all of this Balmer confusion...

Oh Steve Ballmer… You certainly enjoy stirring up the enthusiast press, don’t you?

If you missed the tempest in a teapot earlier today, there was a lot of excitement when Microsoft’s CEO, speaking at the Executive’s Club of Chicago, reportedly told attendees that a new Xbox 360 would be arriving in 2010.

In a word: Balderdash.

Ballmer is a master of hype and sometimes lets his enthusiasm run away with him. That seems to be the case here.

Microsoft gaming officials have made it clear that “Project Natal” will launch with a lot of fanfare. And the dramatic changes the motion-sensing controller will bring to the system are, in some ways, the next generation of Xbox. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to see a new Xbox hardware unit.

The only likely exception to this would be a revamped 360 that costs Microsoft less to produce. (Akin to the heavily speculated slim PlayStation 3 – same machine, different form factor.)

Oh, and that ‘confirmation’ of a 2010 launch date? More balderdash. Microsoft officials at E3 were adamant that Natal would not launch until there was a critical mass of software to support it.

That may well be in 2010 – but since developers have only had the tools to create Natal-based games for two weeks now, it’s not set in stone.

Ballmer’s enthusiastic, but he knows better than to launch a monumentally expensive hardware product without software support.

Here’s the official word from Larry Hryb, Xbox Live’s Director of Programming:

“A few people have emailed me regarding something Steve Ballmer said earlier today about a new Xbox coming in 2010. As the Xbox team stated at E3 two weeks ago, we are not even halfway through the current console generation lifecycle and believe Xbox 360 will be the entertainment center in the home for long into the next decade.  Project Natal will be an important part of this platform, but we have not confirmed a launch date at this time.”