Xbox Was Enshittified From Within ⭐

As I had long suspected, it’s the bean counters at Microsoft that are working to destroy Xbox from within, and not Xbox leadership. But this is a healthy reminder that we all answer to someone. And that when it comes to pointing the finger of blame, it’s important to find the right target.

That target is Microsoft CFO Amy Hood.

A credible report in Bloomberg co-authored by Dina Bass, an investigative journalist who I trust explicitly, confirms a growing worry I’ve had, not just about Xbox, but about Microsoft more broadly. And that fear is that the control of this company has shifted from its CEO and board of directors to the person who arguably is more important to its recent successes than anyone.

That requires a bit of explanation. But only a bit: If you look at Microsoft’s meteoric financial rise over the past decade, especially in its stock price and thus in its overall market value, a few things become obvious. None of this is tied to the success of particular products.

Almost all of it is instead tied to financial manipulations and a steady scaling back of transparency so that shareholders and Wall Street no longer have any insight into where the money Microsoft makes is coming from and how much it is really spending on money-losing products that it sees as potential future successes.

Amy Hood became Microsoft CFO in mid-2013. Satya Nadella, who is incorrectly credited for the company’s successes over the past decade, became CEO in early 2014. He was always a curious choice for this role, at least to me, but he had been at the software giant for over a decade by that point—his previous employer was Sun Microsystems—and had risen through the ranks to become a senior vice president of the Online Services division and then the president of the Server & Tools Division over the previous several years.

My view of the Nadella ascension was that he was an engineer, and this marked the return of a technologist to the helm, which is vaguely good for a company like Microsoft. But in watching several Steve Ballmer interviews this past year, a different story emerges. Aside from the facts I did know—it was Ballmer and not Nadella that kicked off the cloud-first strategy that drove the coming decade of successes—I learned that Nadella was a necessary sell job for Wall Street. Analysts and shareholders were too used to Ballmer and wouldn’t have believed that he could drive change at Microsoft as it transitioned into a cloud computing superpower.

The problem is that I, like many others, view Microsoft as if it were a technology company. My biggest issue with the company over the time frame discussed above is that it shifted its focus to something I do not care about, enterprise computing in the cloud, relegating the Microsoft products and services I do care about to the back burner. Worse, as the focus changed, the enshittification of those products and services I do care about gathered steam and then exploded. It was...