You don’t just suddenly pay double for an entire team when you have endemic problems in the organization. Especially when Meta and Magic Leap were also throwing money at these people, and Apple was throwing their entire ecosystem might at it.

For some of these roles, it’s highly specialized people and you can’t find just any engineer to replace them. When your vision leaders leave, you can’t just find someone to replace them. When they’re leaving because the head of program is an abusive pervert, money isn’t enough to keep them.

And this is a recurring theme with anything outside of Microsoft’s core competencies. They cannot long term execute.

Windows and servers has been their competency since the 90s and has been firmly stuck there.

Mobile computing? Failed twice.

Music players? Failed.

Xbox? Currently in the process of failing for the second generation in a row.

Microsoft do not have the necessary culture to do this. They leave things on the vine and see if it dies or blooms. They don’t weave a story or make strong ecosystem plays.

That’s the biggest difference between them and Apple. An Apple product comes with a vision story. It comes with the ecosystem.

Yeah my wife briefly worked with a team on Bing, she said her team was basically operating like horror stories she’d been told about outsourcing sweatshops, complete with verbal abuse from managers and general disrespect from developers for a woman in a management/leadership role.

She was later told that this is a pretty typical experience if you end up in a lower priority team that’s primarily made up on contractors.

You can't honestly call Xbox a failure. This is a $20B market and about 10% of Microsoft's revenue.

As a physical product (which my list was about) , you absolutely can.

They went from dominating in the 360 era (when Sony fumbled the PS3, and Nintendo switched directions to the Wii) to two generations of poorly received releases and being in third place. That’s even if you filter by the specific markets they dominated in with the 360.

And what are they focused on now? Windows gaming and cloud services. Their two core competencies.

And why? The people behind the original Xbox and 360 vision left. When you have no vision leaders in the company you fall back to what you know. In their case: windows and cloud services.

Seems like you have thought about this a lot. What do you think about xbox? It seems like with cross play and gamepass they should be doing well but maybe they are failing with console price/quality and poor exclusives.

Current Xbox head is former director of their internal studios org. He doesn't know how to foster 1st party AAA(A) titles.

I think Xbox squandered their lead from the 360 to the Xbox One/Series One.

The gamepass and cross play is nice, but they don’t have compelling exclusives to drive hardware sales. Combine that with absolutely terrible product strategy like their naming strategy and rewriting feature parity between the S and X, it’s no wonder they’re third place now.

Gamepass has only further eroded their console market because it reduces the need to buy it when you can play on your computer or stream.

They’ve also barely capitalized on many of their extravagant purchases yet. Especially with Activision Blizzard, it remains to be seen how they’ll do exclusives without falling afoul of antitrust.