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.

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4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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righthand 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I 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).

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scott_w 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Just 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…

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WorldMaker 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Xbox 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.

	▲	munificent 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 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.
	▲	saghm 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Right? 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.
	▲	an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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butlike 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can blame her for the last 10 years because she's CEO _now_. That's what you do. You blame the head of the organization for the organization's problems.

	▲	13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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WhereIsTheTruth 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ratio of consoles sold Xbox vs PS5 was 1:3 before that, after that it fell in the 1:10 territories (december 2025)

Using Phil as a scapegoat and Sharma as the savior is disingenuous.. and is honestly pretty consistent with how i view Microslop: opportunists, tasteless, and visionless executives, shareholders and fanboys

The fall of Xbox started before the launch of thier current gen:

- HW: they announced 2 SKUs, with polar opposite performance profiles

- SW: their system sellers got delayed to couple years

The reset needs to happen at the highest executive order, not at the lowest, workers implement whatever project was greenlit

People chose PS5/Switch over Xbox (it now sells 3x less than Switch 1, wich is a previous gen console), people see through the lies of the media

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nhinck2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

a) Asha didnt push Phil out.

b) She's been in the role for 4ish months, not years.

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righthand an hour ago | parent [-]

I can guarantee you Asha has been making this move for years.

	▲	dagmx an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Based on what? This just feels like baseless conjecture given she hasn’t been at Microsoft for that long.
	▲	johnnyanmac 41 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I 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.

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dagmx 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

How would Asha pull him out? How do you think she even had that kind of authority or seniority?

	▲	righthand 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		By 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.