The big news of leadership changes at Xbox last week understandably has everyone searching for answers, an explanation as to why so many key decisions were made all at once, seemingly out of nowhere. In our rush for that clarity, though, it's important to remember that just because we want to know the whole truth behind something as quickly as possible, doesn't mean we can.
Nathan Grayson
Which brings me to The Verge's piece from earlier this week, by Tom Warren, headlined "Inside Microsoft’s big Xbox leadership shake-up". That's a headline suggesting it's going to provide the exact answers everyone has been looking for: why is Phil Spencer retiring now, what's gone wrong inside Xbox over the last few years, why did his apparent successor Sarah Bond leave the company entirely, and why the hell did Microsoft appoint a natalist AI-loving weirdo as the head of their video games division?
Tom Warren
Instead we get a story that spends its first half taking shots at the departed Bond, as "more than a dozen current and former Microsoft employees" line up to criticise her efforts at the company, particularly her role in the disastrous "This Is An Xbox" marketing campaign. It then spends its back end airing internal misgivings about Asha Sharma, which is hardly unique since everyone has misgivings about her.
Microsoft is an enormous company. Xbox itself is a huge division, and loads of people are and have been responsible for everything that happens there, from the boss on down. When you consider that Xbox has been in terminal decline since the moment the Xbox One was revealed over 15 years ago, a sequence of interwoven events and trends that are the result of countless people's missteps and ineptitude, it sure seems weird to dedicate so much time in the story to the legacy of a single Black woman.
Unless, of course, you recognise the story for what it is: a chance to vent about Bond, orchestrated not by Warren (who is simply serving as the messenger here), but by every source inside Xbox who was so willing to speak to The Verge so soon after the events of last week. Gamers may not be entirely familiar with this kind of story, but if you're a sports fan, you'll know them all too well.
Here's a recent example of what I'm talking about: last year Tottenham announced the signing of former Brentford boss Thomas Frank to be the club's new manager, and they couldn't speak highly enough of him. Even as Spurs struggled through 2025 and into 2026, sliding ever closer to the relegation zone, club leadership publicly supported him. Then, when results became untenable and the board finally decided it was time to sack him, well. Suddenly a deluge of stories hit the major sports papers, all purporting to explain just why Frank had been so terrible and why getting rid of him was such a great move, like this pathetic expose in The Telegraph, claiming Frank's "bizarre obsession" with rivals Arsenal "sealed his fate".
Spurs are a club that, one hilarious trophy win last season aside, have been on the slide for years now. Ownership has been useless, the board even more so. Their transfer dealings have been poor, meaning no matter how many players they sign or how many managers they go through, they've found themselves having slipped from regular Champions League contenders just a few years ago to facing the serious threat of relegation from the Premier League. The problems at Spurs run far deeper, and have been going on much longer, than the tenure of Thomas Frank.
Yet the second he was out the door, along came those stories, each claiming to have the inside scoop, to satisfy everyone's desire for scapegoats and answers, when all they were really doing was providing a chance for disgruntled insiders to air some dirty laundry, and for a failing institution to take advantage of the media to lay some blame at the feet of someone who was already out the door, instead of at their own.
I've little doubt there was frustration inside Xbox at Bond's tenure, and I've no doubt that folks are concerned about the new boss. But for the sources in the story to be so focused on Bond while sparing Spencer or anyone else tells you more about what's been happening behind the scenes at Xbox than the contents of the piece ever could.
