Almost two weeks ago, Asha Sharma publicly posted the memo her and Matt Booty wrote to the Xbox team. The biggest point? "We are Xbox." When I first read it, I thought she was changing their internal name to We are Xbox. The way the whole sentence was bolded and separated read confusingly. I'm probably the odd one out. But the name change demonstrated nothing. The whole memo read as "Everything is a problem, even the name!"
I didn't expect solutions, but it read like a laundry list of goals that she may or may not be able to keep. We have no sense of what they're prioritizing. She says "Our new north star will be daily active players. We will execute this through four priorities: hardware, content, experience, and services." So, everything. We'll prioritize everything. Got it.
What's frustrating is that corporate aspirations read as if they exist in a vacuum. "We'll make the current box better, we'll make Project Helix awesome, we'll make great games, get more third-party support, get into China, make developers love creating for us, and make Game Pass affordable and sustainable." PlayStation exists, Nintendo exists, Roblox exists, Valve exists, your boss exists.
