David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…In fact, you’re making my point for me. If I had to make the case of why Xbox has been somewhat of a folly and perhaps not worthy of a full acquired episode, it would be, there was a lot of Microsoft’s best people worked on Xbox. This is a group of people that went and created Xbox Live that by 2012 had 40 million subscribers. People who built a core competency of running a big online service. These are some of the best product people. The aesthetics of Xbox from a physical perspective, but also the software. I just think it was a sinkhole of some of Microsoft’s best product people and just hardest working people. The culture at Xbox was so hard-driving to produce, at least in this point in history up to the 2010 timeframe, very little in the way of contributing to Microsoft’s business, but soaking up a huge amount of the talent. Imagine if that product design sensibility was deployed across the rest of Microsoft. Totally. I think Xbox Live is debatable. We’ll come back to this with Azure. Xbox Live was one of the original pioneering internet services, subscription services across any category of software and technology. The DNA and experience that Microsoft built from that served it extremely well. I think there are two gigantic benefits. Look, the gaming market is massive and important. If you could try to own one market in the world today, in the world of entertainment, it’s gaming. I’m just saying Microsoft didn’t up until that, at least this point in history. But it’s the right market to go after. They were not successful in capturing value from it at this moment in history. But you’re right. The two big things that they were able to do is build out a core competency of running a big online service, which totally led to Azure, which we’ll talk about later. Two, it really did make Microsoft relevant with a whole new set of consumers when Microsoft was completely irrelevant in their lives.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.