Much is still new for Asha Sharma, the 38-year-old executive whom Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in February put in charge of turning around one of entertainment’s biggest brands. Her office, adorned with Xbox controllers, framed Halo game discs, and a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater skateboard, at first seems like an odd fit for an executive who famously had zero past video game experience.

Yet the Xbox CEO who’s replaced gaming legend Phil Spencer is moving fast. Xbox’s finances have been in shambles while its market share has tanked from its peak years ago. Sharma must fix its economics while improving its brand. She has been blunt about Xbox’s poor performance; has cut thousands of staff members; is reimagining how Xbox markets and sells its products; is upending its tech stack; has divested or reorganized smaller studios; and is focusing Xbox around its biggest franchises and publishing groups, including Blizzard Entertainment.

Flashy moves aside, Sharma has a challenging road ahead. Turning around a sprawling $21 billion business that includes hardware, creative studios, and thousands of video game titles is a task that would test even the most experienced of CEOs. And at a time when Microsoft is intensely focused on competing in the AI race, many industry observers wonder how committed the company is to the gaming business, and if Nadella has put Sharma in charge to prepare for an eventual sale or spinoff.

As Sharma works to revitalize the storied gaming unit, Microsoft employees, investors, analysts, and gamers are all focused on a key question: Can a gaming industry outsider bring Xbox back to its glory days—and if she can, under what structure will that happen?

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]:  https://fortune.com/2026/10/20/the-non-gamer-ceo-racing-to-save-microsofts-xbox/?utm_source=reddit/

The app builder part isn’t new. Plenty of tools already do that. What’s interesting is Microsoft making third-party AI tools plug into Entra governance.

Will it contribute to a real shift in how these integrations get built going forward?

The powers that be at my company answer employee-submitted questions at monthly meetings through an “anonymous” Microsoft Form.

I had doubts about its anonymity, because I used to set up MS Forms at another company, and was for sure able to tell who submitters were through Power Automate or the Excel export even without a question asking for their email.

I also tested this theory by opening the form link in an incognito browser, because if it was truly anonymous, I shouldn't need to log in right?

I shared this logic with the person who creates the forms for the company and they tried to persuade me this is not the case, then they assured me that they checked with IT and said login is required to keep outsiders from submitting, but names/emails aren’t recorded, so it’s completely anonymous, even to them.

That security question feels weak and bogus to me, because if the link is only shared internally and the form is just collecting questions for a company meeting, what risk are we really protecting against? Someone outside the company submitting a junk question? They definitely sift through the questions before the meeting and claim no question goes unanswered, so its not like this would truly be an issue because they have to add them to a presentation and should be able to recognize bad actors.

Anyone else experience anything similar and are skeptical? Ultimately, my hesitation is because I have some hard hitting questions for my company that I feel would come with backlash if they could trace the question back to that person. Am I missing something where they may genuinely be serious? I also doubt it because this is a pretty big SaaS company that is tech savvy

So I was browsing the Microsoft page and came across a certified refurbished Xbox x and the price is insane.

I haven't seen any news articles about it, but I first noticed it was mentioend in some support articles that there is a "Microsoft 365 Pro" tier subscription not listed on the main landing page, but is searchable. This looks like it's new?

It's priced at $100/month and the main differences is that has much higher usage of Copilot and agents, as well as offering 5TB of shared storage between the 6 family members (the total that Premium originally had).

Thoughts? Personally I think is it's too expensive for all but the most dedicated Copilot users. Also, like Premium, it limits the AI features to just the subscription owner's account, not sharing them with the other five people, which at this price is a bad call in my view, given how they've priced it for Premium.

After using the new Copilot "Super App" for a couple of weeks and reading a lot of the blogs around it I wanted to share what I've found both about the app itself and what it means for organizations wanting to bring the right level of AI based on the task and outcome to their employees.

https://youtu.be/YSFSR8d58Bk

00:00 - Introduction

00:33 - Pace of AI change and possibilities

02:34 - Home

03:40 - Enterprise knowledge

05:59 - Chat

10:24 - Plugins

12:48 - Notebooks

14:00 - User Seat License billing

16:15 - Cowork

18:04 - User Based Billing consumption

19:31 - FinOps

22:08 - Chat or Cowork

23:22 - Intent routing

24:45 - Code

28:19 - Autopilot

29:56 - Summary

32:10 - Close

The Employment Q&A Thread

Welcome to the Weekly Employment Q&A for r/Microsoft!

This thread is where Redditors can come and ask questions about working at Microsoft. Please do not use this space to ask technical questions as they will be removed.

Schedule

The Q&A will be refreshed every week on Mondays at 1200 Pacific.

Previous Threads

You can view previous employment threads using this archive link

I used to use Microsoft Threat Intelligence to look up domains and get information like associated subdomains and WHOIS records, but I can’t seem to find that functionality anymore.

Has it moved into another Microsoft product or become part of a separate licence, or has it been retired completely?

If it’s still available, where do I access it, and what licence do I need? Mainly interested in the domain investigation features rather than threat intelligence feeds.

Thanks!