The Guardian (which is a great newspaper in general, not usually for game-related news) has been running a multi-part interview with Peter Moore in which he has confirmed certain long-standing rumors (the M$ did make an offer to buy Nintendo several years ago), shed new light on certain ancient history (he was the one who made the call to axe the Dreamcast), and now he takes a shot or two at Rare:

I thought ultimately it would be very successful – and you know,Microsoft, we'd had a tough time getting Rare back – Perfect Dark Zerowas a launch title and didn't do as well as Perfect Dark… but we weretrying all kinds of classic Rare stuff and unfortunately I think theindustry had past Rare by – it's a strong statement but what they weregood at, new consumers didn't care about anymore, and it was toughbecause they were trying very hard - Chris and Tim Stamper were stillthere – to try and recreate the glory years of Rare, which is thereason Microsoft paid a lot of money for them and I spent a lot of timegetting on a train to Twycross to meet them. Great people. But theirskillsets were from a different time and a different place and were notapplicable in today's market.

He also notes that the cost of the harddrive was the major consideration in quickly pulling the plug on the original Xbox:

The hard drive in every Xbox killed us; we we're still selling it at$199 and the hard drive was like $70. That's why we prematurely leftthe original Xbox, because the more we were selling – there was stillgreat demand – it was killing us, and there was no way to bring theprice down. So in the end we determined at around the 25 million unitmark that we just needed to slow this thing down and just not sell anymore, and move to the 360 as quickly as we possibly could. And to thisday people still believe we left the Xbox too early but it was purelyfor financial purposes.

Fuck peter moore .. Even though Rare hasnt come up with any thing great for quite a while , he has not right to diss the Stamper brothers . 

Perfect Dark Zero.