The Wall Street Journal painted a rather idyllic portrait of Asha Sharma, the CEO of XBOX. The businesswoman was the subject of a lengthy article in which she is portrayed as a person with a "brutal honesty" essential to turning around Microsoft’s gaming division.

Sharma tells her colleagues that "clarity is kindness." To get the division back on track, she has already implemented 3,200 layoffs at Xbox, with 1,600 more to come. Stan Chudnovsky, who was her supervisor at Meta, describes her as "very intense", someone who "works very hard" and "expects the people around her to work very hard as well", and who also seems to take the time to personally handle certain requests made by players through customer support.

"She’s won praise for removing a widely disliked Xbox AI assistant and making it easier for people who own games on discs to get digital copies. To better understand players, she spends a few hours each month responding to customer support tickets, during which she’s learned how complex it can be to fix a single player’s problem."

Now, Asha Sharma hopes to get Xbox back on track by focusing on the company’s flagship franchises, such as Halo, Forza, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and specially Minecraft, which is seen as a potential direct competitor to Roblox.

Finally, the head of Xbox pulled off another major coup last week by poaching PHYSINT from PlayStation, thus forging a strong and lasting partnership with Kojima Productions. It remains to be seen where all of this will lead.