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  • 9 minutes ago
Much is still new for Asha Sharma, the 38-year-old executive whom Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in February put in charge of turning around one of entertainment’s biggest brands, Xbox.

As Sharma works to revitalize the storied gaming unit, Microsoft employees, investors, analysts, and gamers are all focused on a key question: Can a gaming industry outsider bring Xbox back to its glory days—and if she can, under what structure will that happen?

Fortune Tech Correspondent Sebastian Herrera joined Fortune Daily with Ellie Austin to discuss Sharma’s plans for Xbox and the questions surrounding the gaming division’s future.

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Transcript
00:00We're starting to really go back to some of the core principles that made Xbox great.
00:04We all know games like Halo or Call of Duty, and that's all Xbox. This is a 21 billion business
00:09inside of Microsoft. And a lot of people don't realize that Microsoft owns Xbox, but it's
00:14actually their third largest business by revenue. It was a very curious choice when Satya Nadella
00:20chose to make Asha Sharma the Xbox CEO, because she was falling in the footsteps of a gaming
00:25legend, Phil Spencer. She's famously not a gamer. She did not play video games before this job.
00:29But she was put into this job because she's an operator. She was going to go and slash
00:33and cut and make the cutthroat moves that needed to be made inside the business to right size
00:38it. She's laying people off. She's consolidating studios. She's focusing on their biggest brands
00:43and seeing how much more money they can make.

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