Microsoft CEO Nadella: Xbox Division Will Not Be Sold
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has mapped out the course he wants to take in an email to his employees. The Xbox division will not be sold and Nadella promises to invest further in the platform. Furthermore, Nadella wants to focus on cloud services and ‘mobile first’.
Financial analysts and some shareholders hoped that after he took over from Ballmer, Nadella would sell the Xbox division. This would allow Microsoft to better focus on its most important and most profitable products and services. Former CEO Bill Gates also said he would support Nadella if he split the Xbox division. However, Nadella has indicated in an email in which he outlines his course changes that Xbox will remain part of Microsoft.
According to the CEO, Microsoft owes a lot to the Xbox platform. For example, Windows has ‘borrowed’ technology from the Xbox team and, for example, speech recognition in Skype and camera technology from Kinect have become possible thanks to investments in this division. Furthermore, Nadella indicates that Xbox is a powerful brand with a growing number of users, and that he sees many future opportunities with the platform.
Nadella also states that Microsoft should now focus more on productivity and broad platform support. For example, the software giant could better respond to the development towards cloud computing and the rise of mobile devices, even if they run a non-Microsoft operating system.
The CEO still left open what his plans are with the acquired Nokia. There are rumors that Microsoft wants to save hundreds of millions of dollars by merging the two companies. There is a good chance that many jobs will be lost. In his e-mail, Nadella paints a picture that he wants to shake up the corporate culture: ‘nothing is off the table’, if he refers to the steps that must be taken to achieve this. For example, the company wants to provide more training to employees in order to be able to get another job and it calls on teams to see how they can work more efficiently.