Phil Spencer and newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella debated whether Microsoft should continue to support the Xbox, which was losing market share to Sony, when Spencer assumed leadership of the company’s gaming division in 2014.
Spencer and the Xbox are at the centre of the software company’s biggest acquisition in less than a decade. Microsoft has made it obvious that gaming is no longer a question and is, in fact, crucial to the company’s future with the closing of the $69 billion acquisition of video game publisher Activision Blizzard on Friday.
Don Coyner, the first employee to work on marketing inside the company’s Xbox division, remarked, “It is an astounding amount of money for Microsoft, whose core business is not gaming. The company’s talented employees should be able to explain the high price, according to Coyner, who left Microsoft in 2018.
In a short amount of time, Spencer’s standing at Microsoft has significantly increased. In 2020, he admitted to a reporter from the gaming website Shacknews that the only reason he was able to take over as president of Microsoft’s gaming division was because so many other employees had quit while he was still employed there.
Activision represents one of the most expensive technology transactions ever. It’s been quite expensive and time-consuming in addition to being expensive.
Microsoft and Activision were forced to extend the closing date, which was originally scheduled for mid-July, by three months due to regulatory resistance from the European Commission and agencies in the U.S. and U.K., which delayed the acquisition by over 21 months.
Source (CNBC)
