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This is incredibly sad for a lot of my friends who are finding themselves out of work despite delivering well received products. But at the same time I appreci
by dagmx 3mo ago
This is incredibly sad for a lot of my friends who are finding themselves out of work despite delivering well received products.
But at the same time I appreciate the candor of Asha saying that the corporate management are to blame and letting studios go back to being independent where possible.
Phil Spencer really messed up. Everyone in the industry knew Microsoft were making bad calls trying to dig themselves a hole with gamepass and simultaneously digging a hole with their acquisition spree. I’m glad that Asha is laying this bare even though it sucks to be brought in as the hatchet person.
This is an example of the glass cliff and I’m hoping she can help right the ship. I think they need to split to a wholly owned subsidiary rather than be in Microsoft proper, and I expect that to be announced at the Q1 investor meetings.
Phil really dug their hole deep. Microsoft themselves encouraged it. It’s been a decade of sheer incompetence at the highest level so I’m hoping they can right this without taking out half the industry in their wake.
- righthand 3mo agoI disagree, it wasn’t Phil that dug a hole but Asha who pushed Phil out with no plan. Why is Asha finally revealing her plan years later if she was such a good fit? She came in trying to automate away peoples jobs with AI for the last year or so and that is obviously failing. It wasn’t Phil that invested the entire company’s well being on stochastic parrots. She has done everything but focus on delivering games (product).
- nhinck2 3mo agoa) Asha didnt push Phil out. b) She's been in the role for 4ish months, not years.
- righthand 3mo agoI can guarantee you Asha has been making this move for years.
- dagmx 3mo agoBased on what? This just feels like baseless conjecture given she hasn’t been at Microsoft for that long.
- ascendantlogic 3mo ago"I can guarantee you" without any backing evidence is the very definition of "Source: trust me bro". I think at this point this is just trolling.
- johnnyanmac 3mo agoI don't think a long time executive leaves, and the expected successor (Sarah Bond) refuses to suceed because of some intimate backstabbing behind the scnes. Especially not by an executive who was previously running the AI division during an AI gold rush. Occam's razor: Spencer and Bond jumped off a sinking ship, Asha wasn't doing enough in AI. Push her to be the fall gal for the sinking ship and put in whoever will milk AI more in her place. Win-win. Asha will be gone in a few years with her job done and a cushy parachute, and Xbox will be a shadow of its former self. But that's not a failure; that's the goal.
- scott_w 3mo agoJust looking at Sharma’s history, she rejoined MS in 2024. Xbox was struggling long before that, so I don’t see how anyone can blame Sharma for the past 10 years…
- WorldMaker 3mo agoXbox has been profitable almost continuously since a few years into the Xbox 360. It's fascinating how "profitable but low margins" equates to "struggling" to so many.
- saghm 3mo agoRight? It seems intuitive that markets can eventually saturate, and that there's a floor for how low you can get costs, so growth can't be infinite. Maybe you could make an argument that you want to grow in scale with inflation so that your profit doesn't eventually become meaningless, but you don't need to "reset" your multi-billion dollar revenue business to achieve that; you can get that by just bumping prices in line with inflation every few years.
- munificent 3mo ago> It's fascinating how "profitable but low margins" equates to "struggling" to so many. A high revenue but low margin business is a lost opportunity to invest that same revenue in a different area with better margins.
- WorldMaker 3mo agoIf you shut down the things that bring in $5 billion revenue, you no longer have $5 billion revenue, you have a gamble that some other industry can ramp up to that quickly. $5 billion has never been "quick money". (Inflation would have to get a whole lot worse for that to happen and that point the company has too many other problems.) That's "Opportunity Cost" among other bits of what used to be past corporate wisdom that companies have seemed to have forgotten.
- 3mo ago
- dagmx 3mo agoHow would Asha pull him out? How do you think she even had that kind of authority or seniority?
- righthand 3mo agoBy making big arguments to C-suite that were invested in the company’s direction. Same thing that happens in meetings where some dumbass says something like “we could build a cookie banner ourselves or pay Y company $12k/yr to run our cookie banner”. C-suite is full of these types of people that just make baseless arguments. Most management is not knowledgeable in their domain.
- dagmx 3mo agoOkay so your entire argument hinges on her having the ear of Satya , and out arguing Phil? But even then you wouldn’t be able to deny that Xbox was floundering under Phil. And for all of this you’d still be left with conjecture?
- markus_zhang 3mo agoEven if she did push him out, Phil only has himself to blame. After all he is the manager of Xbox. Xbox definitely did not do well.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- theandrewbailey 3mo agoMicrosoft: Moves AI exec to Xbox exec. Xbox exec: Deletes AI from games. Color me surprised. Anyone who's been paying attention to Halo for the past 15 years knew there was bad management the entire time. (Halo used to be the game that everyone wanted to have and to be; now it's an also-ran due to self-sabotage.) The first step is admitting you have a problem, so good job there, keep following through.
- bargainbin 3mo agoHalo Infinite was the moment I knew Xbox was gone. The core game engine was the best Halo has ever felt, but everything around it reeked of incompetent management. Giving a player a reward for putting in effort is one of the fundamental principles of game design. If you remove all the rewards, what incentive do they have to play? Their response to player backlash which was essentially “deny, defer, gaslight and ignore” killed the online community for it within a couple of months, and I think they dropped what little content support it had within two years as well, after initially marketing it as a long-term “live service game”. Blatant incompetence, how Microsoft ever let itself get in this state I’ll never understand. Also I can’t even remember the campaign story. Was there an angel or something? It was a cliffhanger about some new enemy, as if they’ll ever make another game? I just remembered the monstrosity that is the Halo TV series as well now, ah god… it’s been a rough decade.
- nxc18 3mo agoI don’t think Phil had any other options while existing under Satya and a relentless push to services revenue. If Windows can’t make a case for itself without moving heavily to services (advertising and pushing 365, primarily), how could Xbox? I’m not really sure how the C-suite is escaping blame here.
- rtpg 3mo agoBuying Activision was a Phil decision. Not spending 67 billion dollars puts you in a different place
- dagmx 3mo agoOh I definitely agree the C-suite at Microsoft needs blame. Microsoft need everything to be framed as avenue into services. But Phil was the one who dug two incompatible holes and kept digging hoping they’d meet in the middle with buried treasure.