Tom Warren

She's very straight about that and honest about it.

But not that that really matters, I don't think, to be a CEO, really, to be honest.

But to Xbox fans and that gaming segment, if they see a non-gamer, it's like...

particularly with Xbox I think because Phil has kind of instilled that over the years they've come to that expectation so yeah I think that was the surprise of it but I don't think Cerebon was a surprise to me

It's a couple of things, right?

So obviously Microsoft came in as balloon now, right?

Because it's got Bethesda, obviously Activision Blizzard has made it bigger than ever before, right?

And then you've got this tension of...

Microsoft get like the corporate Microsoft of Satya Nadella and Amy Hood putting the pressure on that new division to, you know, return.

return the money that they've invested into into this project essentially so through profit margins um so they've cranked that pressure up over the past couple of years and it's forced phil sarah everyone under them to then respond right so they've done these studio closures they've done cuts they've done price increases they've tried to accelerate um you know get getting more people using export services essentially so that became the strategy of like okay we need we need to

get to tvs we need to get to mobile and all this stuff and there was a lot of like

I guess trying to rush that, it felt like, and forgetting that the console was their base of building up Game Pass and their base of taking those people and perhaps moving them elsewhere and user acquisition, growth, all that sort of stuff.

And it just feels like they tried to rush that and they did this, this is an Xbox campaign, which was just super strange.

It was trying to say that a phone was an Xbox and it was born in this idea that

They need to speed up the margins.

They need to get more revenue, get more growth and improve those margins, essentially.

So when you're trying to pin blame on whoever it is, it's like it comes from the top.

Satya and Amy, they're pushing these margins.

And I think they're slightly unrealistic in the context of gaming anyway.

There's not the margins that Sony has, for example.