At this point the answer scare me a little. Did Xbox knew, and told something else to MS? Did they knew, told MS and got ordered to do it anyway? Or did they really believe in their strategy, and are simply as surprised as us?
I have been thinking about similar questions. Especially this one. Not that I know it's true but because it's the most salacious.
- - Did Xbox know, and told something else to MS? - -
This is my favorite one, of course. In this scenario, Phil's been under a lot of stress for years now, and it makes work more difficult. Judgement can slip, and emotions can affect decision making. It's not hard to imagine the guy who wrote those emails could get their perspective a little skewed. He does all these interviews and if you listen to them, it won't be that long before hearing something that can be directly contradicted by what came out in the trial.
What if he is telling people inside ms that they have this vision to turn xbox into the biggest gaming outfit ever with the cloud. Did you hear that, Satya? Cloud. Uncle Satya likes the Cloud. So Phil claims this is this multi-tier plan that includes the console along with pc and other things, and it's going to pivot away from hardware eventually. They won't need to sell xboxs. But the problem is, in Phil's heart of hearts, he wants to win all the wars. Valve. Nintendo. And especially sony. They'll pay for dreamcast. Them and all their stinky little ponies. So he lets his "passion for games" affect his work, including what to say and how to say it.
So maybe, when there are discussions at MS about the road map for pivoting away from console, Phil has a tendency to overstate the case of the console in the current meta. And maybe with all that time he spends talking on twitter engaging with fans colored the internal conversations about how another generation of xbox was going to do. And phil is primed to be way overly optimistic and maybe even tell some half-truths about how good they were poised to do with console sales. And you know that's really important for our cloud strategy because blah blah insert justifications here. When really, he should have known the best thing would have been to pivot away from high volume consoles sooner than later. Especially with the bgs and abk purchases.
Anyway, doesn't mean it happened but it's fun to think about because it's a very human story, yet possible. "One man's hubris brings down and empire". Very dramatic, ha.