Month: November 2020

This could have been Microsoft's last game console if things had gone a bit differently at the company in early 2014.

Today Microsoft celebrates the start of its fourth (or fifth?) generation of video game console hardware with the launch of the Xbox Series X/S. But Microsoft Xbox Chief Phil Spencer says the company's gaming efforts almost didn't make it to this point, and Microsoft was considering abandoning the console space just after the 2013 launch of the Xbox One.

In an extensive interview with Shacknews, Spencer looks back a bit at the tumult within Microsoft in general (and the Xbox division in particular) leading up to the Xbox One rollout. The retirement of Xbox President Don Mattrick in July of 2013, just after the Xbox One's troubled E3 debut, left planning for the Xbox One launch "distributed amongst the company in what I would say is a way that wasn't really feasible for Xbox," Spencer said.

With just months to go before launch when Mattrick left, control of the Xbox brand was splintered across three teams: a platform team headed by Marc Whitten; a first-party games team led by Spencer in "another" part of the company; and a separate marketing team that had been "moved out" from the rest of the Xbox planning. "I don't think it was the best move for stability of our launch," Spencer recalled.

Enlarge / A sign outside an Amazon warehouse in Germany. (credit: Thorsten Wagner | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Europe's top competition regulator filed charges today against Amazon, alleging that the company has abused its size, position, and access to data to gain an unfair advantage over the competition.

The European Commission's statement of objections against Amazon is centered on the firm's "dual role" in e-commerce, where it is both a retailer and also a platform for third-party retailers. As a platform, Amazon has access to proprietary data about all those other merchants' online business, which it then gathers and uses anticompetitively to get a leg up in its own retail operations, the EU alleges.

This is not just an infrequent or occasional lapse, the EC determined, finding instead that "very large quantities of non-public seller data" are available to Amazon and "flow directly into [Amazon's] automated systems." Amazon then allegedly uses that data to make its own determinations, "to the detriment of the other marketplace sellers."