Nilay Patel

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.

And

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.

We'll be right back.

Hi, everyone.

This segment of Decoder Sessions features my boss, Helen Havlak, the Veritas publisher, and L'Oreal Group's Global Vice President of Tech and Open Innovation.

I think you're going to enjoy this conversation.

We're back with Verge senior reporter Tom Warren talking about the future of Xbox.

Before the break, we were discussing why executives Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond are out after years of trying various strategies to help Xbox catch up to the competition.

But now I want to get back to where those plans came from and pinpoint where it all started to go off the rails.

Let's talk about Xbox strategy as a whole.

Because if you're saying it's not changing, it's worth taking a beat to just understand what the goal has been.

And I would say since 2017, Phil Spencer has been very clear that what he wants to get to is everyone is subscribed to Game Pass.