I dag har Xbox-afdelingen det ret godt. Takket være Game Pass, xCloud og de nye Series-konsoller, så er brandet kommet tilbage på sporet efter en ret katastrofal første afsløring af Xbox One for syv år siden med Don Mattrick ved roret.
Det er blandt andet Phil Spencers fortjeneste, og hans hold naturligvis, men der var et tidspunkt hvor Xbox-afdelingen reelt set var i fare for at blive lukket. I et interview med ShackNews siger Spencer, at de stillede hinanden nogle hård spørgsmål oven på lanceringen af Xbox One.
"So Satya becomes the CEO in February. Then the question is, do we go forward with Xbox? Because we're getting really outsold by PlayStation in the market at this point. Do we stay invested in it? Or do we make a different decision? "
Dog formåede Spencer at overbevise Nadella om, at Xbox bør være et centralt fokus for Microsoft, og resten er historie.
"He and I had a discussion, and I made a pitch. I said, "You know, gaming can be a real important consumer category for the company." He didn't quite understand it yet, not from an intelligence standpoint, but he just hadn't been close to it. But he was willing to make a bet on us as a team. And I said, "The thing I need, if I'm going to step into the role to head this group, is I need to bring it back together. I can't have my hardware team over there and the platform team over there, and first-party over there. I need to bring it back as a cohesive team." And he agreed to that. So I ended up working in the Windows division, but we brought all those pieces back together."
