Satya Nadella has once again reaffirmed his stance on Xbox, insisting that the gaming arm of the business is to a large extent removed from its ‘core’ interests. Microsoft has given its strongest indication to date that its Xbox arm may be in line for a pretty painful round of redundancies, while at the same […]
Satya Nadella has once again reaffirmed his stance on Xbox, insisting that the gaming arm of the business is to a large extent removed from its ‘core’ interests.
Microsoft has given its strongest indication to date that its Xbox arm may be in line for a pretty painful round of redundancies, while at the same time stating that the brand doesn’t represent a ‘core’ element of the firm’s overall business.
Ever since Microsoft took the helm at Nokia following its $7 billion buyout, employees have been waiting to hear news on inevitable redundancies. The majority of cuts were expected to hit Nokia itself and a variety of other departments across the business, though it’s now looking like heavy cuts could be made to the company’s Xbox marketing team.
And while CEO Satya Nadella insisted that Microsoft as a whole is in no way shunning or walking away from Xbox, the brand isn’t considered a ‘core’ part of the primary business focus at Redmond.
“Xbox isn’t that far from the core,” he said in an interview with Fortune.
“We can do a few more things than the core. But the point is, you’ve got to have a culture to do it,”
“I want us to be comfortable to be proud of Xbox, to give it the air cover of Microsoft, but at the same time not confuse it with our core.”
Of course this isn’t the first time that the Microsoft CEO has made the Xbox gang feel a little left out of the party. Some time ago, an email he penned to Xbox workers made it abundantly clear that gaming was not the primary interest for the company.
This echoes an earlier email from Nadella to employees in which he wrote:
“As a large company, I think it’s critical to define the core, but it’s important to make smart choices on other businesses in which we can have fundamental impact and success,”
“The single biggest digital life category, measured in both time and money spent, in a mobile-first world is gaming,”
“We are fortunate to have Xbox in our family to go after this opportunity with unique and bold innovation. Microsoft will continue to vigorously innovate and delight gamers with Xbox. Xbox is one of the most-revered consumer brands, with a growing online community and service, and a raving fan base,”
“We also benefit from many technologies flowing from our gaming efforts into our productivity efforts – core graphics and NUI in Windows, speech recognition in Skype, camera technology in Kinect for Windows, Azure cloud enhancements for GPU simulation and many more,”
“Bottom line, we will continue to innovate and grow our fan base with Xbox while also creating additive business value for Microsoft.”
