Lol I do sometimes miss “evil Microsoft”, the old ruthless one that even makes PlayStation of recent years or Apple look cuddly.
But we’re in a new age now, they find they catch more flies with honey that vinegar, so the days of buying / bankrupting the competition and suing those who spread lies about them are over.
Which a lot of “gaming” media should be relieved by lol
Phil has been rumored to be retiring for the last 2+ years after the ABK deal went through so no surprise here. I would have liked to see him stay through the 25th Anniversary and then retire. That would have been cool.
Sarah Bond leaving is the shocker because I was always expecting her to replace Phil as it always seemed that she was being groomed for that spot. Matt Booty being promoted is shocking as well but my guess is that he’s good with his role/position and doesn’t rock the boat.
As for the new Gaming CEO Asha Sharma, have to wait and see how she does but in all honesty, im not expecting anything to change and Microsoft will simply stay on the same course that they’ve been on for the last two years.
For me personally, all I care about is the following -
As long as the above three happen/stay intact, I have no valid reason to leave or even want to leave the platform and eco-system. I pretty much get everything that I want.
To give an a more complete assessment of Asha Sharma’s experience, here is some context, taken from https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/asha-sharma-replaces-phil-spencer-as-microsoft-gaming-ceo-all-about-new-xbox-head-11116432
Who is Asha Sharma?
Asha Sharma is an alumnus of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. She has nearly 15 years of experience across technology, product, and operations leadership roles, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She began her career at Microsoft in 2011 in the marketing department. After a two-year stint, she joined Porch Group as Chief Operating Officer, where she played a key role in building the company. She led product, engineering, sales, marketing, and operations and was part of its $1B public debut. She also served as Chief Marketing Officer earlier and was a board member from 2015 to 2022.
In 2017, she joined Meta as Vice President of Product and Engineering. She served as Head of Product across Messenger and Instagram Direct and was General Manager of calling, video and kids experiences. She had earlier worked as Director of Social Impact Products.
Sharma later worked at Instacart for three years as Chief Operating Officer, helping lead the company to IPO and profitability. She was responsible for a $30 billion-plus GMV P&L, overseeing product, design, data science, research, marketing, operations, customer support and new businesses.
In 2024, she rejoined Microsoft as President, Core AI Product. She led the product portfolio for AI models, applications, agents, responsible AI and developer tools for customers worldwide. Previously, she served as Corporate Vice President and Head of Product for Microsoft’s AI Platform.
Maybe the experience in marketting would be useful for Xbox Gaming.
Maybe the experience with building things out and scaling up would be useful for Xbox Gaming.
Wasn’t she in AI for like 18 months out of a 12 year career? You are right, she doesn’t have a lot of overall experience but there is something exciting about that. You may prefer they hired some dusty old jim ryan type person. Or how about Bobby Kotick, you might have liked him. Tons of experience and proven track record. And we would get more numbered sequels and packaged products. But there is something exciting about Asha’s hire. She must be a total rockstar to reach the top so fast. I know the internet loves to dump on people, but how about we let them do the job first before we pull out the pitchforks.
Consols, consols, consols. You gotta stop looking at it like that. Not the xbox strategy anymore. They don’t care about console sales. They care about paying customers.
The common xbox series range is 35-45M. Add in a few million for people still on the xbox one. There are 200M console customers and that number hasn’t changed in years. So xbox has around 20-25% of the multi billion dollar console market. Boo hoo. Only 25% of this huge industry. Think stadia would have taken that kind of market share when they tried to break in? Think Nintendo would have taken that kind of market share with the wii u? Its big dollars and lots of customers.
However it is nearly impossible to make that percentage grow. Ask playstation. they not growing console sales either. So what has xbox told you? they want to reach more customers through play anywhere. PC and cloud and mobile. so now add the millions of pc and cloud customers to their total. Notice how on their earnings calls they always mention record growth in pc and cloud? That is because console is too hard to grow. Its the same 200M old dudes in it every year. The play anywhere plan is what ultimately saved xbox.
So the next time you want to type the word console, change it to customer and then pay attention to what xbox is doing and it all becomes pretty exciting.
So we’ve known or expected Phil to retire for awhile now. Maybe instead of retiring in the middle of the upcoming generation it was better to retire now and let the new person take over at the start. There doesn’t need to be anything nefarious about it. We’ve got to remember these are regular people just working a job. He could be having health issues or want to be with his family more who knows? He definitely could have retired ages ago, his MS stock/retirement portfolio over 40 years or so has to be quite substantial. Lets not act like he needed to keep running the rat race like most of us.
The hate campaign for the new girl is already spinning up in the usual places so business as usual for Xbox.
ha ha. so true. I should have stayed off the internet yesterday. I have a feeling phil pulled asha into his office and told her a huge part of the online gaming community are complete manchildren. she prob laughed at that one and he had to be like, I’m series they are totally unhinged.
If we take a step back and say what happened yesterday:
Internet - lets create this imaginary soap opera of crazy shit that MUST have been happening behind the scenes. Phil and satya scheming behind all senior leadership’s backs. sarah blind sided today. I mean clearly she was blindsided b/c she stopped tweeting for 60 minutes. The evidence couldn’t be clearer. Millions of parasocial relationships shattered all at once.
Most people on this forum stayed way clear of that, thank goodness. But others sure like drama.
My only real concern with the leadership change, in the here in now, is keeping the momentum going on the progress they have made with devs, particularly with japanese dev, moving forward.
Maybe it’s just me, but those who kept saying no gaming background is pretty much saying, “How dare your life is kept private!” I get Cartman from South Park said privacy is dead, but come on.
One of the main things to ‘worry’ about. Sarah and Phil did great jobs, with Sarah in the lead, rebuilding their relationships throughout the East.
Copied from discord which was copied from elsewhere (sorry, don’t have the original link).
It’s nice to see some actually spend the time to investigate and learn about the new player on the field.
They gotta drive clicks somehow. People are determined to make this into another “Xbox is dead” story when we literally no nothing.
I think we can rule out exclusivity but I think she can at least have a clean slate in the public. But ultimately I think it’s best that she operates like Johanna Faries.
No more parasocial stuff with the community and just listen to the concerns and implement them the best she can.
No, I’d rather use the last 2 years out of context to push my own narratives in online social media circles! She’s the AI devil!
/s
Also, Johanna Faries is apparently doing an incredible job yet she came from the NFL.
Good business people should be able to do well in any environment, as long as they can adapt, which is I guess the whole point of their job. People think they have business schools of gaming and business schools of football or something.
There’s no secret reason behind the premium tier.
All third party games that aren’t day one will be in premium because ultimate is for day one first and third party games and they still want people to see the value in the premium tier because theyknow ultimate is not for everyone.
Now regrading the future I’m not going to argue with your point because it’s subject. But I will say that if you’re still hoping they reverse course and can go back to the traditional console model this isn’t going to be a brand for you anymore respectfully and you’ll have to either accept it or move to PlayStation or PC.
You can be right and everything can go wrong and they gut everything expect abk but I would like to be an optimist and believe that won’t happen.
This is sort of a concern of mine also, but a few months ago there was a report they promoted the lady who was in charge of Xbox in Japan to overseeing all of Asia. I have a feeling a lot of credit should go to her and if so Xbox is probably pretty good there.
I wouldn’t even other platforms. People don’t realize how it literally would require there to be close to 0 paying users for a platform to pull off everything and even then, the download servers would still be active. Like the frickin Wii and that’s Nintendo, you can still download and update all your library.
She has done an incredible job so far, the support from Japanese studios is easily better than ever. Hopefully she will continue to be in that position!
