In case you missed it, Friday saw news arrive of a substantial corporate reshuffle at the top of Microsoft’s gaming division. CEO Phil Spencer was revealed to be retiring at the same time Xbox president Sarah Bond was revealed to have resigned, leaving new boss and former president of Microsoft CoreAI Asha Sharma to don the crown of green plastic.
A report from The Verge has now offered a bit more detail as to how all this chair-switching went down, and unsurprisingly, it reads like an account from a struggling kingdom whose ruler’s just announced plans to abdicate.
According to the report, Spencer’s spitting out to whichever planet retired execs live on had been in the works since last year, with “months of careful successor planning”. All that careful planning ended in chaos when the announcement leaked a few days early on Friday, leaving Microsoft playing catch-up. Hence departing president Sarah Bond’s lengthy and bland departure post not arriving at the same time.
As to why Bond’s departed, rather than ending up as Spencer’s successor, the report paints a picture of her as taking the lion’s share of the blame for a much-disliked ‘This Is an Xbox‘ marketing push/wider strategy, which has seen Xbox emphasise their presence across multiple platforms and devices. Basically, rather than trying to herd folks towards Xbox consoles, the company have experimented with shouting that you can play Xbox games through apps on PC, handhelds, phones, and tellies.
The Verge report this campaign “offended many Xbox employees internally”, and has subsequently been questioned in the face of Microsoft’s decining hardware revenue. Now, we get to the bit of the report which to me reads most like the sort of thing sports teams put out to control the narrative if, for example, behind-the-scenes drama between execs and star players requires a public scapegoat.
The report cites most current and former Xbox employees as being “relieved that Bond is leaving Microsoft”, with more than one source alleging she’s “been tough to work with, and built a team structure that meant if you didn’t follow the vision or questioned it, you were out”. That said, Bond’s ability to strike up relationships with companies and devs has gotten good reviews.
As the report notes, Bond was implementing the ‘This Is an Xbox’ strategy/ads while operating under Spencer’s leadership, so it’s noteworthy that she appears to be taking most of the flak for it. While the clandestine nature of machinations at behemoths like Microsoft likely means we’ll never truly know who had the most hand in these calls, Bond being judged in stronger terms than the retiring senior exec she was once tipped to replace – amid a lot more positive eulogising of his time at the top, and after years of being PR-spun as a relatable gamer-boss – is a bit eyebrow-raising.
That’s not to say Bond – who, unlike Spencer, wasn’t mentioned in the corporate email memos of Microsoft big boss Satya Nadella, new boss Asha Sharma, or newly promoted exec Matt Booty – didn’t have a large hand in strategy, or behave in the way the Xbox staffers cited by The Verge claim. It all just seems rather convenient to pile the outgoing regime’s failures at her door, after a rough few years for Xbox.
Meanwhile, new CEO Asha Sharma’s reportedly facing concerns from some staff over her AI background, and whether her tenure’ll see the company move away from consoles for good, with both being things she moved to reassure folks on in her email memo upon taking the gig.
So, there you go. A new face is on the throne. The old regime have been shown the door in whichever form was deemed acceptable to the baying crowds beyond the keep. The Microsoft gaming arm is dead, long live the Microsoft gaming arm.
