Nilay Patel
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
acquiring Activision, doing all the other acquisitions of the studios they've done.
I look at this and I say, well, it doesn't matter if Sarah was the best manager or the worst manager, the strategy that she was instrumentally a part of failed.
And I kind of see this and I say, okay, if I'm such an Adela or importantly, Amy Hood, the CFO of Microsoft, I'm saying we've done some of the biggest acquisitions in history, certainly the biggest acquisitions in Microsoft history, but
And none of this came to anything.
We got to reboot this whole thing.
Does that feel as important inside Microsoft as maybe Sarah wasn't the right person?
Actually, this is my big question.
And this is, again, there's the reporting you have about Sarah as a manager and a leader, which I want to come to.
But then there's the, well, it's Microsoft.
All Satya and Ella care about is mobile and cloud.
That's not even the AI part of it.
This is a business that runs huge cloud services in Azure and needed a new foothold in mobile.
They basically bought Candy Crush to get a bunch of mobile revenue.
Of course that's what they wanted to do.
And it feels like actually the decision is not so much about Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond.
It's this whole strategy failed and now we're going to try a new one.
And I'm just curious if you have insight into the balance, right?
How much is the strategy failed, we just need a new regime versus we need a new strategy and Sarah specifically cannot execute a new strategy?
We need to take a quick break.