Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, made several candid statements about the state of the Xbox One at a panel during the 2015 GeekWire Summit. He went so far as to recognize that he doesn't know whether the Xbox One can outsell the PS4 this generation and that Sony has "a huge lead and they have a good product."
His understanding of the Xbox One's negative policies at launch is sobering:
Whether it's always-on, used games, whatever the feature was, we lost the trust in them that they were at the center of our decision-making process.Were we building a product for us, or were we building a product for gamers? And as soon as that question came into people's minds and they looked at anything, whether it was the power of our box, our launch lineup, microtransactions, any of the features that you talked about, what you find is very quickly you lose the benefit of the doubt.
You lose your customer's assumption that the reason you're building your product is to delight them and not just build a better and more maybe manipulative product.
Phil Spencer goes on to admit that he was disheartened when "some words and some actions from executives kinda just trash all the work that you've done over the last three years, many weekends and night, and you start to question why am I doing this?"
But he believes that the team is now more "motivated by the customers that we have and their ability to delight them" and that Xbox is "not motivated by beating Sony, [but] motivated by gaining as many customers as [they] can."
