Xbox is Xbox Again
Microsoft have published an open-letter to employees and players called "We are Xbox" in which they recognise some of the mistakes they've made over the past few years.
It's hard to know whether or not they actually understand the problems, but let us focus on this line:
You can play where you want, and your games, progress, friends, and identity stay with you across console, PC, mobile, and cloud.
It would be easy to read that and assume that they've learned nothing, that this is the same "Everything is an Xbox" strategy that Phil Spencer has been talking about over the past couple of years. The one that so many players have hated.
But there's a subtle difference that we really determine whether they've learned.
Can a console (or PC) owner stay connected over mobile and cloud OR can a non-console (or PC) owner stay connected over mobile and cloud.
It is the latter of these that has caused so much consternation among Xbox fans over the past couple of years.
(I'm grouping PC and console together here because I think those players see themselves as comparable, in that they've both invested in the Microsoft view of the gaming world).
The Microsoft strategy under Satya Nadella has been "Microsoft Everywhere" which was very different from the Ballmer strategy of "Windows Everywhere". The change recognised that with cloud computing on the rise, Microsoft could have success by selling you an Office 365 subscription and that working on whatever computing platform you had, even if it wasn't Windows. You could argue that since they lost mobile, they didn't have any choice, but I think it's a good strategy for the world we live in - you just increased your potential customer base massively.
You can hardly be surprised then when the Xbox strategy became "Xbox Everywhere". And not just because they need somebody to be a customer of their own Azure services.
But console owners are not the same as enterprise customers. Buying a console is like buying a ticket to a festival. You're doing it because you like bands that play, the other people who go to that festival, and the price of drinks at the bar. You like that they sell recordings of the stages you couldn't go see and take home a poster for your wall.
What you don't want is that now the recordings are available for sale at every other festival. And that anyone can buy a poster even if they didn't go. And wait - was this festival live on YouTube? Why did I bother when the exclusivity is gone? I no longer feel special for making the effort to go.
Live voting, purchasing is an emotional decision, not a rational one.
If I've bought into the Xbox ecosystem, then being able to play my games on my mobile device is an extension of the service I joined. This is a great benefit and a selling point for why somebody would want to choose this ecosystem over another.
If I hear that anyone can play those games, because "Everything is an Xbox" then I'm going to question why I bought in. I should have just picked Playstation or Nintendo instead. Nobody else gets Mario.
And if the games are also available on Playstation, then that's a benefit for the Playstation ecosystem, not the Xbox one. It's literally one more reason to go get emotionally attached to Microsoft's competitor.
(Let's just take a moment to think about how bad a decision that was).
So will they learn from this? The real test will come when it comes to giving Project Helix a proper name. If it's called Xbox 6, everything will be fine. If it's called Xbox Project One... then it's time to go buy Sony stock.