Hey, thanks everyone. Thanks for joining us for day one of the Wells Fargo TMT Summit here in sunny Southern California. Very pleased to be helping host the lunch session here with Microsoft. So we have Tim Stuart, who's, we were just discussing, has a lot on his plate with everything that's happening in the gaming world, particularly this time of year. So, looking forward to the conversation. I'll let you sit first, and we can-
Yeah, great.
Talk a bit.
First of all, it's great to be here. You know, sunny, sunny Southern California versus Seattle, I'll take this any day.
Yeah.
It's nice to just kinda look outside and see some sun, but-
Yeah, thanks for coming down the coast.
Yeah, it's great.
So, just, there's a lot to cover.
Yeah.
- in a limited amount of time. But you've spent a lot of time at Microsoft.
Yeah.
So maybe we can just start with over the past few decades, the evolution that you've seen. There are a few different milestones that I think we think about. We think about Satya and Amy and the move towards cloud and Azure.
Yeah.
Now we're seeing the advent of AI.
Yeah.
Maybe you can just contextualize that advent of AI with your time spent at Microsoft, and kind of set the stage.
Yeah, that's a good place to start. I've been at Microsoft for 22 years. I started as an intern. Back then, the big draw was you got to go to Bill Gates's house for a barbecue, and that was kind of the-
No way.
... that was kind of the big sell back then. But yeah, we've seen the kind of, you know, the Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer to Satya era.
Yeah.
And they've all had their moments, and they've all had their unique, sort of fingerprints on the company, obviously. You know, and where we're at right now, with AI especially, is another one of those moments. You know, it's kind of like the Internet moment or the word processor moment, like, really big inflection points for the company, and a place that, you know, Microsoft really has a, has a great position and to really, really change the landscape. So I know for gaming, we- and we'll talk about that in a bit, but, it's meaningful for us. But, you know, at the highest level for Microsoft, AI is, you know, one of the biggest shifts I've ever seen and a really exciting moment.
If you were an intern 20 years ago, does that mean there's a demo video of you with hair like Satya?
Uh, yeah-
Showing some gray-
There's a great Satya with hair picture, I think, out there.
Love that.
I, I also have those, and it's been a few years.
That's fantastic.
Yeah.
So good. So as far as AI, what it means for you as the CFO of the gaming segment-
Yeah.
... maybe we can just talk a little bit about the opportunity set. I know there's a lot to go into.
Yeah.
Then we'll zoom back out to the Microsoft perspective as well.
Yeah. For gaming, you know, I'd say I've never been sort of more excited about a technology shift in the gaming landscape. You know, maybe the last one we did was when we went from kind of discs and consoles to, let's call it online games, games as a service, think like Fortnite, Minecraft, things like that, which really changed the landscape of how people play. Mobile games being another one.
Yeah.
I think AI is one of those inflection points for us. There's really two sides of the coin that I think about it from a gaming landscape. One is for the consumer, and one's for the developer, the people creating the games. On the developer side, you know, you think about the, you know, millions and millions of dollars in a game spent on localization, script, how you think about players moving from point A to point B, and you have to have, you know, a non-player character, or the game get... You know, have dialogue. AI can take care of all that. You now say, "Hey, I need a player to get from A to B," and instead of having to write, you know, 1,000 lines of scripting or code, you just have the AI get you from A to B.
Things like localization, putting things in new languages. When we think about game testing, you know, 1 million AI bots can run through a level of Minecraft and find where players get stuck, where they spend money, how they think about a level. So this is, pun intended, game-changing for the developer.
Well done.
And then, I've used that before, by the way. And then for the consumer, when you think about how a player or a person playing a game interacts with AI, you know, we have an example of, like, you're in Minecraft and you're playing in a level, and you're talking to Hermione from Harry Potter, and the Hermione character is an AI—it's an AI agent that's running-
Right.
... through the Hermione scripts. It's from Harry Potter, by the way. And you're having a nice, nice unique moment. So, I think for gaming, there's really those two sides, developer efficiency, speed of creation, and then in consumer, kind of love for the game and how it really adapts you.
Yeah. So let's spend more time on the developer side, because you and I were having a sidebar conversation around this-
Yeah.
... and the future vision there, to me, is very compelling.
Yeah.
It's compelling on both sides.
Yeah.
Right? But I think intuitively, I don't know if I appreciated how quickly this is evolving. So your view on-
Yeah.
... what AI capabilities can open up from the developer side in terms of speed or type of game or just type of developer?
Yeah. An example I like to give is, you know, there's probably, you know, pick your number, 100,000 maybe game developers in the world, kind of across companies, big and small. And now with AI, and we'll call it, like, you think like GitHub or with Copilot, you can, you can generate code, you can generate instances, you can generate games, you can generate art assets. "Hey, I want a tree with snow in the desert," you know, something like that. What it opens up now is, anyone in this room can be a game developer, whereas before you had to have a unique sort of, call it unique angle. "I know how to code," or "I'm a multiplayer-level designer." But, you know, now it takes the 100,000 game developers in the world to millions and millions.
The barista at your local Starbucks has an awesome idea for a game. They can now use Copilot, they can use, they can use AI to go create a great mobile experience.... And so you think about mobile being that kind of first instance of a lot of, I'll call it, AI-generated mobile games. Some will break through. You know, you'll find your Flappy Birds, if you remember that game, or Angry Birds, kind of these-
Mm.
... simple games that really take off. I think you're gonna see a really an explosion of the kind of these, we'll call them, we call them citizen creators, people that are not historically game creators that can now make games. And that's gonna, I think, create a new wave of multi-platform, unique experiences, and obviously, they're all built, built on AI.
That's super compelling.
Yeah.
We're not gonna hold you to a timeline or trajectory in terms of metrics, but thinking how far or close.
Yeah.
We are to citizen development happening on the gaming side.
Yeah, you know, the ability for someone to go into, and you know, ChatGPT, or, you know, it's Copilot or something, we're still, you know, a little ways away from that. But what we do see is things like art assets. Even I can go out to, you know, like, Bing Image Creator, and I can generate, you know, "Create me a CFO in the spirit of Halo that looks like they're playing in a, you know, desert," or something like that.
You should have brought that.
That's a game I'm trying to build that game.
Yeah.
I haven't really quite found the uniqueness, but those kind of things I think will happen sooner than later. So we're already seeing-
Wow!
... the ideas being generated, and I think we're actually gonna see a pretty fast acceleration on putting the art, plus the code, plus the level design together, and I think we're gonna see some great games coming here in the short while.
That's pretty incredible. So it feels like every part of Microsoft is exploding with newfound opportunities because of AI.
Yeah.
So-
Yeah.
... you're the CFO of a significant becoming more significant, and we'll get to why in terms of scale in a minute. But the advocating process with Amy, like, how do you ensure that you're getting adequate resources and-
Yeah.
... what are the kind of puts and takes of what's being assessed at the Microsoft level and making sure that all of these incredible Copilot opportunities can-
Yeah.
-come to life?
You know, at the Microsoft level, it's full speed ahead. You know, Satya and Amy across our senior leadership team are, you know, putting resources, time, energy, effort into this space. And, of course, you know, we talk about there's GPU capacity, and there's things you've gotta, you have to weigh out, but, you know, we work through those scenarios. And in the end, it's good ideas win. Go develop Copilot in Office. Go develop Copilot in Outlook. How do you think about GitHub with Copilot? And that's a great place to be.
We even look at, you know, things like Copilot in gaming, and while this isn't a broad announcement or anything, you can go into your, you know, think about your Xbox or your mobile experience and say, "I really love Starfield, but I'm in the mood for a spooky game." And Copilot has a recommendation engine that says, "We see you like these kind of games. Your friends play these types of games. You should go play Dead Space," or some, you know, pick a game like that.
Yeah.
So we see like, a Copilot-like example in gaming as a huge value driver for customers as well. Think recommendation engines, how you play the games, what you wanna play, your friends are playing. And I think we'll see some, from a CFO standpoint, you actually see some monetization opportunities, which we can talk about as well, which is-
Yeah.
... hey, you're getting people into more games, playing more often-
Yeah.
... which is kind of our secret sauce.
Yeah. I mean, choose to answer this question how you may, but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least ask about the thing that everyone was armchair quarterbacking during Thanksgiving-
Right, ah.
... which was just OpenAI and the partnership and the relationship. So just from the Microsoft standpoint, if you can level set for the group here today, the partnership, the dependence, the cooperation that goes into the Copilot technologies, and just what you'd like to impart.
Yeah, you know, I think the big thing from my seat, and obviously, I'm a sort of an arm's length from that specific relationship, but really, it's just the partnership the two companies have.
Yeah.
You know, Satya talks a lot about, "Hey, look, we're in the same position we were a few weeks ago," kind of with the ins and outs of what was going on in the news. But in the end, all this, you know, it's a great partnership with companies working well together to develop just awesome technology. So from our seat at gaming, we get to leverage a lot of that tech, and like I said, that's Amy and Satya really pushing a great relationship and making sure that we invest in the right places to create awesome, awesome AI landscapes.
Yeah. You've also been busy with another AI. It's with a TV in the middle-
Yeah, yeah.
... ATVI and Activision, right?
That's a good one. That's good, yeah.
You can use that one.
I'll use that. That's good.
Going forward as well.
Yeah.
I mean, that deal was announced. It feels like ages ago. Early 2022.
Yeah.
Finally became official, so maybe given there's been a lot of time that's passed since the initial inception, just help level set for everyone the opportunity set, the focus, the strategic rationale for Activision, and then we can get into kind of the permutations afterward.
Yeah. It does seem like, it's been a while on the Activision landscape. And, you know, we went through the process. We worked with the right, you know, regional regulators and worked through that thing, and thankfully, we got to a place that's, I think a good, good outcome there. Activision, you know, Blizzard King, ABK, as we call it sometimes, is really an accelerant to our gaming strategy. I talk a lot about it's not the strategy, it's part of the strategy. You know, and really, for, you know, gaming at Microsoft, when we look at what we've done the last 10 years and where we're going, we think a lot about the cross-platform play, which is, I wanna play on all the devices that I have and all the screens that I have.
And I think that's really when I think at the sort of holistic lens is the how do I make sure that we're on Xboxes? And I'll say PlayStations and Nintendo Switches-
Yeah.
... in a mobile landscape. How are we on mobile? We can talk about cloud as well, but-
Yeah.
... really at the highest level, it's leveraging what Activision is so good at, which is consoles, and PC, and mobile. How do we take that great DNA, make it an accelerant to the IP that we have, leverage the great assets that they have, the expertise that they have? And, you know, thankfully, we both talk a gaming lens, or a gaming language. And even the few, what, months since we've been sort of united entity, just the speed of which we've integrated and the speed of which we've worked together has been really impressive.
Yeah. Can we talk more about the mobile opportunity specifically?
Yeah.
within Activision, and maybe that's an area where Microsoft has been less penetrated than other areas in the gaming side, so-
Yeah.
Is that one specific app that you're focused on?
Yeah. Mobile is, you know, the most gamers in the world play on mobile. We think about you know, the console landscape, and part of the real evolution of the deal was, "Hey, look, we've got a fixed console audience with Xbox," or relatively fixed, but not growing that fast. You've got 200 million kinda console adjustable market. You've got 300 million or 400 million kind of in that PC gamer market, and then you have billions in the mobile market. And mobile games are hard to make. You have to have the DNA, you have to know how to AB test, you have to know how to do performance marketing and how you think about getting installs, and we've tried on our own a few times.
We've got a great Minecraft mobile experience on iOS and Android and other things, so we've got some foothold, but what Activision Blizzard King does on mobile is impressive. And what they've done with, Candy Crush being one of the biggest ones from King, but also you think about Call of Duty Mobile. That's the most players playing is frankly through Call of Duty Mobile. You think about what they've done with Blizzard, and Diablo, and World of Warcraft mobile, they just talked about at BlizzCon a few weeks ago. And like I said, Candy Crush. So they're taking their IP into the mobile landscape, and they know how to do it, how to build it, how to iterate quickly, and that's just... That DNA is gold.
Yeah.
We can then leverage that with our IP and take the learnings into our business and say, "Okay, how do we go now address these new, you know, frankly, these new billion gamers that we've never had a chance to go reach before?
Yeah. How does that, how has that evolved with what we were talking about earlier in this citizen developer-
Yeah.
opportunity? So now there's a couple of different worlds, right? You have a content creation engine-
Yeah.
... that is well-defined and has built a great library and has strong franchises in many areas. We're talking about a world where development could come from many different forms.
Yeah.
Talk about how you kinda keep the competitive gap there, and if-
Yeah.
... it's changed at all in terms of talent, or development cycle, or how you think about some of these things, just as the technologies are shifting.
Yeah, so I'd start with, you know, Microsoft in general is a, like, DNA—we're a platform company in our DNA, whether it's Azure or Windows or, or what have you. And we treat or we think about gaming in very similar ways. So kinda think about two ends of the spectrum, at the maybe, I don't wanna call it lower end, but the more casual end, you've got citizen creators building games that they can launch in our store, on the Xbox platform, in our apps, into xCloud, which is our game streaming service over the cloud, even on mobile. So you can capture that end of the pipe, and then you've got your high-end, call it triple A game, you know, game experiences, Halo, and even Minecraft, Call of Duty, Diablo, which is a new one from Blizzard. So I think you've got...
I really think about, like, two ends of the spectrum, and then users can come in, or gamers can come into our ecosystem, and they can play a variety of things. And, you know, I, I like to joke and, you know, it's interesting, like, why, why does Netflix not really have a big social experience? You kinda ask yourself, and-
Yeah.
... maybe it's because you don't want people knowing what you're watching, maybe.
Interesting.
Like, do I want people to know I'm watching Tiger King? I don't know if you've seen Tiger King, but you know, kind of this-
That one's okay.
That one's okay? But Tiger King is this great example where, Netflix has this kind of unique experience or unique thing to watch, has a huge draw, creates that top spin, and then you sort of create that viral effect with people. Games are much the same way, and we can talk about Game Pass in a bit, but when you think about millions and millions of people on a subscription service, you need the variety of games to get excitement, to have, you know, launch in new geographies. And that's really kinda where I think about that casual, you know, sort of maybe AI-created games that you can launch on the platform, all the way up to, you know, Halo, what is House of Cards, or, you know, Orange is the New Black, those kind of things.
Yeah, that's a good... I'll give you a chance just to plug Call of Duty. Because timing there was also great, right?
Yeah.
In terms of becoming a part of Microsoft, before the holidays, just one of the most-
Yeah.
... well-known franchises.
Yeah, so if you haven't bought Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, launched on November 10th, you can get... I'll let you go do it now on your app if you'd like to go buy it. But no, great, a great time to really be with Activision, go through their launch motion. You know, you sort of take it for granted now, but they launch a triple-A, hugely successful, millions and millions of gamers game every single holiday. And it's sort of easy to say now that Call of Duty comes every year, but that is a huge feat. The amount of developers they have-
Yeah.
... the amount of work they put against it. And so we gotta ride that wave with them. And we've known the Call of Duty team for decades. They launched on Xbox 360 in 2005 with Call of Duty 2, and so we've been with them for a while. But those kinds of experiences , and being with them, and learning from them has been very, very valuable.
I mean, you wear many hats, so I can ask you a modeling question, too. But just in terms of the model impacts, there are a couple of things that we know in terms of Activision. One is, maybe you can just help level set first party versus third party-
Yeah.
... and what that means for Microsoft and for investors who are kind of trying to formulate through what Activision looked like standalone versus as a part of Microsoft.
Yeah.
And then we could talk about the margin side, too, because remarkable, the company has proven able to protect and sustain margins despite all the innovation that's happening within the company.
Yeah.
Which I, it's we take it for granted sometimes, but I'm sure you don't, and it's really impressive.
You know, it's, I'd say that's, that's from a lot of hard work.
Yeah.
Number one. And Amy and Satya have a, just a great, great focus on driving value, acquiring new customers, whether if you're, if you're commercial or consumer, whatever you wanna, whatever we think about what a customer is, and driving operating leverage throughout that, which means smart investments, targeted investments. We talk a lot about it, the gaming leadership team, one of our most important jobs is resource allocation, putting the right things on the right bets at the right time.
Yeah.
And Satya and Amy are excellent at that as well. Pick the bets-
Yeah.
... you make sure you fund them to where they need to be funded to be successful. Say no to the right things, stop doing the right things, and that's just a unique superpower, for sure, of management. But for us, when we think about the business at gaming as it relates to Microsoft and with Activision, operating leverage and margin expansion, definitely a piece of that puzzle. You know, we think about acquisition amortization separately-
Sure.
... so you can work that in your models. But at the highest level, you know, you go from what was a lower margin, third-party entity that we sold on our store, to a high-margin, first-party business. So that's kind of when you think about the Xbox component of Call of Duty, you know, Call of Duty, you go from, again, that low-margin business to a high-margin business. Then what you do is you also expand and say, "We're now driving high-margin sales on PlayStation, on Nintendo.
Yeah.
You know, World of Warcraft has subscription, high-margin businesses. So you're bringing in high-margin business into a, you know, traditionally more lower-margin business, when we think about the Xbox console and hardware. And that's really, maybe lastly, is where we're going in this business, is that expansion of operating leverage. Where we think about placing our bets, first party, subscriptions, advertising, those are all high-margin businesses that we want to expand into. And what you'll hear from us more and more is a bit of a change of strategy, and again, not announcing anything broadly here, but our mission is to bring our first-party experiences, our subscription services, to every screen that can take a, that can play a game. That means smart TVs, that means mobile devices, that means what we would've thought as competitors in the past, like PlayStation and Nintendo.
Right.
We're going to NVIDIA, GeForce NOW, their gaming subscription service. I know you have Colette, I think, on tomorrow.
Yeah.
You can talk to her about that. But when we think about taking our businesses to these endpoints, again, it's that high-margin business to new gamers, that really Activision allows us to do in a much, I don't wanna say easier way, but a much more, I'll say, fast way to get there, versus trying to kinda build on your own.
I think we got the internal pitch on the way. This one rose to the top.
Yeah.
So, just thinking about how the mix evolves within gaming, more further towards content and services-
Yeah.
... and away from console, can you just talk about the mix? And then does this change the seasonality to a certain extent-
Yeah.
... of what you'd expect from the gaming business relative to what it has looked like?
Yeah. You know, starting with seasonality, one of the things we've focused on a lot is kind of more of a games... think about games as a service, but really we mean that more often ability for you to talk to your customer. Think about Fortnite, was a great example that, you know, really did it well. We did it, you know, even early on with Minecraft. But things like Fortnite are less about a holiday bump and more about the, "Hey, we're launching a Thanos skin around Avengers: Endgame in May," you know, kinda thing. And I know, I'll say as a platform, we love that. Also, my kids love that. So that was a great place to be. But that's kind of a...
If you think about services, and content and services is our North Star, I'll talk about that in a second, but it really smoothed things out. You're still gonna have a holiday bump, right? You're still gonna have-
Sure.
...consoles that we sell, and you're still gonna have, you know, customers that spend in those, in those time periods. But even things like Game Pass, you know, we last announced 25 million Game Pass subscribers. It's obviously grown since then. But Game Pass is this millions and millions of subscribers, month in and month out, which for me, I love, because it's more of a paid annuity-
Yeah.
... as opposed to the, you know, you're betting on those big game launches every, you know, quarter or every year. But a Game Pass helps us smooth it out as well. So two things to maybe wrap that point: about six or seven years ago, we stopped giving console volume externally, and at first it was like, "You know, what are you doing? You're the Xbox business, you're not giving us consoles. That makes no sense." But it was really the first point of us saying, "No, no, it's about content and services.
Sure.
Our business is P times Q, more customers spending more money, and that's really how I think about our model. When we talk about content and services externally, that's our KPI.
Yeah.
For that number to go up, you need more gamers, and you need more gamers spending money. We've really focused on that with our internal teams as a, "Here's how we grow the business. Go bring more users in and find ways for them to play." It goes a little bit to my last point here, is about business model, kinda, we call it business model optimization, but really business model diversity... and if a gamer comes in, they can subscribe to Game Pass, they can buy a game digitally, they can have advertising to fund their gaming that way. So however, however they wanna monetize, we're trying to find a way for them to spend money, if you will, with us, and we've seen that as a very, very good accelerant in this content and services landscape.
It also helps us, maybe lastly, on geographic expansion. You know, the vision I like to talk about is, you know, we've got xCloud gaming subsc- game streaming, and so, you know, you can subscribe to Game Pass Ultimate, and you can stream hundreds of games to really any endpoint that has a browser experience. And for markets like Africa or India, Southeast Asia, maybe places that are not console first, you can say, "Hey, do you wanna watch, you know, 30 seconds of an ad and then get two hours of game streaming?
Mm-hmm.
Africa, you know, is the 50% of the population's, I think, 25 years and younger, with a growing disposable income base, all with cell phones or mobile devices. Not a lot of high-end disposable income, just generally speaking.
Mm-hmm.
So we can then go in with our own business models and say, "There's millions and millions of gamers that we would never have been able to address there. Now we can go in with our business models." So that's a long way of saying-
No.
Smooth it out, but really, content and services revenue is that North Star that we're aimed at.
Yeah, it's a super comprehensive answer. On the last point that you raised in some of the emerging markets, are we there from a technology perspective? Is it certain types of games that you have to focus on because of latency or just underlying bandwidth constraints, or-
Yeah.
...maybe help us understand what that.
I think we're you know, we're largely there.
Okay.
Super fast-twitched, like, you're not gonna be able to stream, 4K, 120 frames a second sports and motorsport experience to a 65-inch OLED. Not yet.
Sure.
So for those kind of experiences, they don't quite exist yet. But for the most part, you know, being a part of Microsoft, and this is kind of an end-around answer, but being a part of Microsoft with our Azure footprint gives us access to about 80% of the gamers around the world. When you think about where our Azure data centers are located, how we've built the latency models to work with gaming, how we've worked with our transmit speeds, I'd say the experience is largely there.
So one of the things that we saw when we announced xCloud, this is a couple of years ago, and you think about the combination of xCloud plus 5G or high-speed mobile internet, was some of our first calls back in were from mobile operators and saying, "Hey, how do I get xCloud on my network? Because I wanna find a way to upgrade people into the high-end data plans as well." And you think about, India or Africa or some of those geographies, they may not have the physical kind of footprint to have the, you know, traditional fiber or whatever, but they've got 5G rollouts that are happening, and I think we're gonna be on the forefront of reaching millions and millions of gamers that otherwise-
Yeah.
... wouldn't have been able to reach in the past.
Another good segue. So just in terms of streaming, I'm hoping to hit on a couple of points, and your answers have been comprehensive enough. I'm confident you can hit on a couple of points at once. But, the pricing monetization strategy within streaming. We see multiple SKUs now. We see the core announcement, so-
Yeah.
... is there sort of a cohort thought behind that or, the pricing strategy and then the points of competitive differentiation, particularly focused on Azure, but anything else you would highlight from what Microsoft has-
Yeah.
... surrounding itself?
So the SKU point, which is a really good one. So we used to have Xbox Live Gold, which is traditionally our multiplayer service, and that was kind of the thing you'd spend money on to play your multiplayer games.
Yeah.
It worked for, you know. It still works largely now, but think about it like a model that said, in the old days of having a console, you'd actually have to pay for multiplayer service. Now, nowadays, when you—I talk to my kids or I'll say younger gamers or even, you know, gamers today, the notion of paying for multiplayer service feels a little bit antiquated.
Yeah.
You know, that when you play on a mobile device, you generally don't pay for it. When you play on a PC, you generally don't pay for it. So but we had millions and millions of players on it. So what we did was we said, "Hey, look, let's have an entry-level Game Pass SKU called Game Pass Core, basically." And Game Pass Core allows you to migrate what was Xbox Live Gold into a Game Pass catalog, and it's got a subset of our, our Game Pass catalog. And for those who don't know, Game Pass is our game content subscription service. You know, for $9.99 a month or $14.99-$17.99 a month, you get access to 100 great games, play as much as you want.
So we've really found a way to migrate that kind of Xbox Live Gold base into Game Pass, and then they see the value of, "Look, if I upgrade up the SKU, the SKU pipeline, I can now get access to the full catalog. I can get access to game streaming," which is in Game Pass Ultimate, our high-end SKU. So I'll say from a business model landscape or from my CFO seat, ability for us to migrate users up that stack, that's a key, key value driver for us. And one of the great things about gaming, too, is if you find a way to drive value to gamers and they're paying for that value that they enjoy, it's actually a great relationship. They don't feel like they're being, you know, kind of grinded down on the dollars.
Like, "I'm paying $17 a month, and I get access to hundreds of games.
Totally.
The value is there.
Yeah.
For us, we offer most of our games, if not all, that we've had before Activision. You know, when a game launches, it's included in Game Pass as well. So that's kind of one of the unique value props that we have. Lastly, I'd say from a Microsoft standpoint, leveraging the platforms that we have to go reach all endpoints. Think about Office today, it's on all endpoints. Azure reaches all endpoints. You know, what we do with our services really reaches many endpoints there. So whether it's our digital store or our platform technology, leveraging our position at Microsoft allows us to move quickly, move with security, move with safety, move with our confidence that we can protect our consumers. We obviously have a trust and safety and security lens that we put on everything we do.
Being in that Microsoft framework really allows us to move with speed and allows us to focus our efforts on what's the best for gamers, what's the best for our business, and leverage Microsoft where we can to do it quickly.
Yeah, that's great. Just, I mean, it's like I'm pleased you're here now because there's a rich list of topics to check through. We just have a couple of minutes left. So one kind of higher-level Microsoft cultural question I have for you-
Yeah.
... is you're not alone in having been there for multiple decades. It's very often we interface with someone at Microsoft that has maybe rotated around different divisions, but has been there for a long time. It seems like that's even more so the case now because of just the gravity and all of the-
Yeah.
amazing bets that the company has placed. But from your perspective, internally, can you speak to what keeps the continuity?
Yeah.
... the longevity, all those things, in markets that are hyper-competitive-
Yeah.
that you're hitting on?
I'll say for me, me personally, the gaming landscape changes every year. So every day you come in, it's a new battle in a good way. It's a new thing to go solve. Combined with the culture of Microsoft... I was actually on a panel last night. I flew in late last night, but yesterday, I was on a panel at the office, and it was, I don't know, five or six or seven of kind of my kinda peer CFOs through the company. And we looked on stage, and we had something like 250 years of Microsoft experience-
Wow!
... between the nine or so of us, or something like that. And you look at that, and I was kinda reflecting later, someone taking a picture and sending it to me. I was reflecting on, why are we all there so long? It's the culture. It's just that what we've seen over the last, you know, for sure, seven or eight years from Satya taking over, was really... You know, he talks a lot about growth mindset, so I don't wanna overuse it, but really, learn it all. Be a good listener, you know, with respect, with empathy. And that really feeds through the organizations. And Satya and Amy, their bar is high, so it's not be weak and do all these things.
It's to be strong, keep your foot on the gas, be smart at what we do, pivot quickly, but you can do all that with respect.
Sure.
I think when we look across the table at other people that are at the company, and you look at people that have been around for a long time, they execute well together. I not to be all sports about it, I happen to like watching like watching sports, but some of the best teams that you see out there are ones that have been around for a while and execute well together.
Yeah.
And they do it with respect. They do it with pushback. There's, you know, it's not easy. It's not easy. The bar is high, and you wanna keep growing the stock price, you wanna keep growing share and EPS, but really, that culture is, is just at the top level. Really, what I've seen is just great.
Yeah.
We stick around 'cause we love it.
Yeah, that's a good question to answer. Just a minute left, so I'll turn it to you for closing remarks. I think the crux of what I'd hope to get is just the major metrics and milestones that you're focused on.
Yeah.
We've touched on a lot, but in three or five years, what you're gauging success by.
Yeah. Success for us is, you know, we can keep growing that content and services revenue, I'll say multiple double digits. And I don't mean that with Activision, without Activision, 'cause you'll see some movement in commerce-
Sure.
... and stuff. But it's really, if we can grow faster than the market is growing, we are taking share in the gaming market, and that's where we wanna be. It's a $250 billion market. We are not $250 billion. And so, you know, early on, and not to make... I'll kinda leave at this point, maybe is, we walked into Satya's office, Phil Spencer, who runs Xbox, and I. We had both taken our jobs about the same time. We've known each other for a decade before that together. We're like: "Let's, you know, let's go do this gaming thing." Walk into Satya's office, "Hey, we're gonna spend $2.5 billion on this thing called Minecraft." He's like, "Yeah," you know, jokingly, he says, "The blocky game, you chop down trees? Like, what?
$2.5 billion for this thing?" I'll say, turns out one of the best acquisitions ever made, you know-
Yeah.
... maybe in history. But he said, "You know, I don't wanna talk about Minecraft. Tell me why we're in gaming." And we put the deck down that we had for the acquisition, and that was a moment for Satya, Phil, myself, Amy Hood, of: Why is Microsoft in gaming? And that was eight or nine years ago, and the answer really is, kind of why is Microsoft in any business? Big and growing market, that we have an ability to take and win share. And that's why we do gaming at Microsoft. And of course, we can leverage assets, and of course, we need consumer brands at Microsoft that are meaningful. You can't just, in my opinion, you can't just be all commercial-led. You've gotta have good consumer lens, too.
But in the end, it's grow share in a big and growing market, and that's what we're here to do.
That's a good note to close on, if any, Tim. Thanks a lot. Really appreciate the time.
Thanks for having me. It's great to be in person, and it's good seeing everyone, too.
It is nice to be in person.