Nilay Patel

He's a Microsoft lifer, really.

Phil's been on this show before.

We're going to run some clips from his past interviews on Decoder because I want to get your take on what happened between those interviews and now.

But at just a very high level, we knew Phil was going.

Is it that everyone expected Sarah to be his successor and that didn't happen and that's the surprise here?

I want to come to Asha and the new leadership and particularly sort of the Microsoft AI of it all because that seems like an important piece of the puzzle.

I just want to stick with Phil and Sarah for one more second.

There's the reporting you have done about Sarah personally and her skills as a manager and potentially CEO.

And then there's Phil and the strategy he pursued for Xbox and Microsoft Gaming.

And a huge part of that strategy is making Microsoft Gaming as big as it is, bigger than Xbox.

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.