But more importantly, Multerer's departure means that almost every single person on the Xbox One team we profiled last November when that console launched has now either left the company or been reassigned under new Xbox chief Phil Spencer. Microsoft's original vision of the Xbox One as a general-purpose living room platform has been drastically scaled back. Spencer is a games guy, and his focus on games is paying off, as the Xbox One just outsold the PS4 for the first time in November. But all the people who were trying to build something bigger? Well, they're gone.
Just go down the list of the people in this feature video we made — a video focused on Xbox TV:
- Marc Whitten, former Xbox VP, is now the Chief Product Officer at Sonos. Whitten was the biggest champion of the Xbox One as a TV platform; he and I argued about the TV integration many many times.
- Ben Smith, the Xbox TV program manager, is also at Sonos now.
- Multerer, who was in charge of the platform that enabled the Xbox One to both play games and run Windows apps, has now left.
- Kareem Choudhry, who was in charge of Kinect development, is now in director of development for all of Xbox. Kinect is how the Xbox One controls cable boxes over IR, but it's no longer bundled with the console and few games support it. And Phil Spencer seems pretty happy the Kinect is dead.
The only person we profiled who has the same role is Jeff Henshaw, who remains the Xbox program manager. That's a big turnover — and an even bigger change of vision for Microsoft's next-generation console.
