Goodbye, Don Mattrick! 5 Things The Last Xbox King Brought Us

5. Xbox One

The Xbox was always destined to be Microsoft’s trojan horse into your living room, but when Ballmer and Gates were mulling pitches from the X-Box team and the WebTV internally 14 years ago, they weren’t thinking of people streaming Netflix, they were thinking of people using Office on their television. People have rightfully criticized Microsoft for playing their Xbox consoles as merely powerful set-top boxes – both the 360 in its dashboard updates and the One, well, entirely – and it’s been Mattrick steering the good ship the whole time. Now that the partners are lined up, the games left to be developed and the console left to be sold, Mattrick’s fleeing the coup for another great adventure in which he will bland-ify and commodify everything about it until it’s a shape you no longer desire.

Oh, he’s fleeing to Zynga. Well, can’t be much worse than it is now, can it?