Why villainize her specifically? Seems like the whole division has been in limbo for a decade. Maybe there are good reasons, I am uninformed on the matter, but hesitant whenever a woman gets run over in tech fora.
That's my question reworded: she wound up being in charge of this particular sinking ship at this particular point in time. Did she hole it below the waterline personally or no?
Does it matter? The one person who takes responsibility for what occurs in a huge organization like Xbox is the person driving the ship. What's done is done. She is responsibile for the layoffs, whether they were made necessary by her or not. She is responsible for choosing to fire the idTech Director of Engine Tech. She owns all of it, because that is literally her job as CEO. Boo hoo her predecessor made terrible decisions too.
She's a corporate executive. Maybe she's not willing to crash the business and take a golden parachute, but if so she's one of a vanishingly small crowd. I would personally bet that she's willing to slash and burn just like other corpos are.
> The glass cliff is a phenomenon described by psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam, in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest.