Remember back in long-ago days of 2013 when Microsoft was pushing the Xbox One as an all-purpose cloud-based entertainment system that wasn’t just for games but also for movies, music and television shows? Well, those days appear to be over and Microsoft for now seems happy for people to think of the Xbox One as just a gaming console. The Verge’s Nilay Patel notices that all of the key executives behind the push to make the Xbox One more than a gaming console have either been reassigned to new positions or have left the company.
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In particular, Patel singles out the job changes of former Xbox VP Marc Whitten, who now serves as Sono’s Chief Product Officer; former Xbox TV program manager Ben Smith, the Xbox TV, now at Sonos as well; Boyd Multerer, who founded Xbox Live and who left the company just this week; and Kareem Choudhry, who oversaw the development of Kinect and who now oversees development for all of Xbox.
Choudhry sounds like he was being promoted instead of ousted, of course. Nonetheless, Patel looks at how much Microsoft has brushed Kinect to the side in recent months and says that the company seems happy to keep it that way.
“The Xbox One was supposed to be the first step towards a living room revolution — it was supposed to run Windows apps, every console was supposed to be a dev unit, and deep interactive TV integration was the next big step — but there’s been virtually no progress on any of those fronts since the console’s bumpy launch, and the people who championed that vision are now mostly gone,” Patel explains.
Patel’s full analysis is very worth reading and can be found at the source link below.
