Nadella discusses Xbox’s importance to Microsoft…

… after not mentioning the brand until 2,054 words into his 3,119 word statement.

Microsoft boss Satya Nadella has pledged to continue backing the Xbox business while also stating that it is not part of its core.

Having discussed the importance of ambition, innovation, mobiles, cloud computing, PCs, services, the Surface Pro, Skype, Office, directories, machine learning and many more across 2,000+ words, Nadella’s company memo eventually touches upon Xbox – although all five mentions of the brand are contained within a single paragraph.

Kinect is mentioned once in the 3,119 word document.

As a large company, I think it’s critical to define the core, but it’s important to make smart choices on other businesses in which we can have fundamental impact and success,” he said.

The single biggest digital life category, measured in both time and money spent, in a mobile-first world is gaming. We are fortunate to have Xbox in our family to go after this opportunity with unique and bold innovation.

Microsoft will continue to vigorously innovate and delight gamers with Xbox. Xbox is one of the most-revered consumer brands, with a growing online community and service, and a raving fan base. We also benefit from many technologies flowing from our gaming efforts into our productivity efforts – core graphics and NUI in Windows, speech recognition in Skype, camera technology in Kinect for Windows, Azure cloud enhancements for GPU simulation and many more.

Bottom line, we will continue to innovate and grow our fan base with Xbox while also creating additive business value for Microsoft.”