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Comment by JL2010 | Hacker News Reader

JL2010

One thing that has gotten lost in the noise of Xbox One's marketing mishap and the targeting of Mattrick is perhaps his history as a true entrepreneur.

While it hasn't shown so lately, Don does come from a grassroots background in gaming as a former 17 year old co-founder and programmer of Distinctive Software in 1982. His company was acquired by EA which likely put him on the path to executive level success. A kind of exit that some founders dream about.

It's easy to make a judgement and discredit or target him but I do believe he has genuine passion for gaming and hopefully he can infuse some of that in a place like Zynga.

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Passion for gaming is great. He has a /lot/ of that.

However: Not a very good technical leader, extremely isolated from the troops (even the principal ones who are designing the new products) which badly affected direction and morale, and very bad at messaging (which I suspect is the /real/ reason he's going).

Of course, what replaces him could be worse.

> and very bad at messaging (which I suspect is the /real/ reason he's going).

Was not he the guy who pushed for Kinect? I am not aware much about MS's internal politics but the timeline seems to match.

If so, then the real reason, in my humble opinion, is this: Microsoft is now about to fight for the 8th generation with an underpowered yet $100 more expensive console.

When I was a PM for Xbox, I had the opportunity to sit down and have lunch with both Don Mattrick and his predecessor, Robbie Bach. Both were incredible tech leaders with a long history in gaming and a clear passion for the industry.

Moreover, people really liked Don. He was a leader that the division really rallied behind, and Xbox had its first profitable year under him. I'm excited to see what he can do with Zynga. I do find the transition a bit ironic due to his history at EA and EA's newly formed rivalry with Zynga.

I strongly believe that Bach was forced out after the incidents with Courier and the Kin. In the same suit, I have a deep suspicion that Mattrick also felt the heat from the Xbox One debacles. Best of luck to him in his new role.

> A True Entrepreneur

Ha. You don't remember Distinctive Software I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinctive_Software#Notable_g...

A company specialized in (not so good) ports on virtually anything they could port stuff on. There were tons of companies doing ports at the time, and Distinctive Software wasn't the best one, that's for sure.

Mattrick has quite a nice background and he was a developer early on who worked on some fun titles, loads of credits at MobyGames (http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,15...) mostly as an executive now. He was at EA for a long time. Headed up the Kinect effort. I wonder if packaging it with XBone (pricing) and the recent PR and backsliding was part of this.

This is strange though, Windows 8 launches and Sinofsky is gone. Then Xbox One set to launch and Mattrick goes.

It's not like their PR campaigns went well in both cases, did they? Windows 8 still fails to impress, and Mattrick was one of the backers of the "repeated online checks" that was cancelled by Microsoft recently following Internet/gamers pressure.

I am far from impressed by Mattrick's legacy within Microsoft. He clearly failed to differentiate their offering vs Sony.

He clearly failed to differentiate their offering vs Sony.

It seems that the market has very clearly differentiated Microsoft's offering from Sony's, but for all the wrong reasons from Microsoft's perspective.

I was talking about the current generation.

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