Microsoft Promotes Xbox Head to Senior Leadership Team (Sep 19, 2017)

Satya Nadella has appointed Phil Spencer, who runs the Xbox team at Microsoft, to the company’s Senior Leadership Team, which now comprises 16 individuals. I just spent some time breaking down that SLT and there are 10 individuals in functional roles, from the CEO to the CMO and heads of HR, Legal, Finance, etc.; plus six individuals who run product or customer segment organizations, now including Spencer. Looked at that way, Spencer has been an odd omission from this team, given that gaming has generated 9-12% of Microsoft’s revenue annually for the past ten years, certainly up there with other groups like Windows and Devices (15% this past year), and LinkedIn (3%). But the Xbox has always been a bit of an oddity at Microsoft, a company which has always been much more geared towards business than consumer markets – indeed, Spencer is the first explicitly consumer-focused executive on the current SLT. More broadly, gaming is one of the bigger individual chunks of revenue, and as Mary Jo Foley points out in the piece linked below, even beyond Xbox hardware gaming is an increasingly important part of Microsoft’s strategy to monetize its consumer efforts, many of which today are free to the user. Arguably the next logical person to add to the SLT would be whoever is running Bing today, since advertising contributed 8% of Microsoft’s revenues last year and it’s another important chunk of its consumer business, albeit with a much lower executive profile (despite spending some time searching, I can’t actually figure out who that is, which tells you something).

via ZDNet

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• Microsoft
• Xbox

• Executives
• Gaming

• Microsoft's Consumer Challenges

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