Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Redmond today. It seems Microsoft has accidentally published a pile of its own highly confidential documents, in the context of its legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the Activision merger.
The unredacted documents were uploaded Friday to the website of the District Court of the Northern District of California, which is hearing the case, as part of a wider release of redacted information. And this incident really is a doozy. One of the documents details Microsoft’s Xbox roadmap, revealing the design and specs of a revamped, disk-free Series X console that will apparently drop next year, together with a new controller codenamed "Sebille." The next-gen Xbox will come out in 2028, it seems.
Another document provides a now-out-of-date release schedule for a bunch of Bethesda games, including remasters of Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Meanwhile, an email exchange in another of the leaked documents shows Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer contemplating takeovers of Nintendo and Steam-maker Valve.
"The FTC was not responsible for uploading Microsoft's plans for its games and consoles to the court website," spokesperson Douglas Farrar said in a statement this morning. Spelling it out more clearly, Farrar told NBC News that "Microsoft was responsible for the error."
These aren’t the only revelations to emerge from the case this week. An intentionally released document shows, for example, that Elder Scrolls VI won’t come out before 2026, and won’t be available on Sony’s PlayStation console. (Speaking personally, these Elder Scrolls tidbits are the most intriguing. I don’t really game, but when I do, it’s Khajiit time.) But the unintentional release of those other documents—which were reportedly attached to an uploaded file and badly hidden—is surely prompting some lively discussions at Microsoft HQ. The company is yet to comment.
But y'know, stuff happens. One unfortunate Big Tech firm yesterday admitted that an employee accidentally exposed 38 whole terabytes of his former colleagues’ private data, including Teams messages and comprehensive backups of their workstations, by misconfiguring a security token in a URL posted to a public GitHub repository. The company—and yes, of course, it’s Microsoft—says its customers’ data was not put at risk by the incident.
One more Microsoft story, because they are just having one of those weeks: Panos Panay, the company’s chief product officer, is leaving nearly two decades after he joined Microsoft as a PC hardware group program manager. Consumer marketing chief Yusuf Mehdi will replace him.
According to Bloomberg, Panay is jumping across to run Amazon’s hardware division, as unit chief David Limp is retiring. So it’s goodbye Surface and hello Echo, at a time when the Amazon unit is reportedly suffering from low morale due to a lack of hits on the horizon—perhaps Panay can fix that.
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David Meyer
