No, those employees are largely not motivated to deflect blame because they're not the decision makers. Why on earth would they lay blame on themselves for something they are literally not to blame for? :/
Employees within operations often do have some very different opinion of how things should be run. And often that's because they aren't given the full of the information that is available when decision making happens. Front line workers often cite their concerns to leadership, and they take that information and make decisions from that. Sometimes that information is useful, and sometimes, despite the fact that the front line workers are right, they still have to make a bad decision about it, because they don't see the other factors in play.
That is what see colon is referring to. If it's an obvious win win across the board, by not taking the front line workers advice, that would be a complete blunder. But if you don't have all the information, then from the perspective of the workers, the leadership is incompetent. This is a common narrative, except most people tend to forget that if you're promoting from within, how did the people who think leadership is incompetent, are making incompetent moves themselves.
A revenue chart also says little when we know Xbox is floundering. If they were in a good situation, they would not be making all the moves they're doing and falling so far behind Playstation. Are we really gonna play dumb about this for the sake of arguing?
Even without the ABK purchase, revenues show Xbox is still making more money than ever before. With ABK they are now comparable to Sony's revenues but positioned significantly differently. It's not about playing dumb, if the market is moving towards cloud and subscription services, MS is in a much better position with MS actually having significant investments in cloud infrastructure. Whereas both Sony and Nintendo specialize in hardware logistics, as a result they are currently the dominant leader in console hardware among other things, their entire strategy is situated around selling hardware units to grow their base. Warehousing logistics and retail channels are things they have built for decades that MS refuses to step into.
MS isn't that type of company, and yet regulators are doing their best to slow and stop MS from moving the industry towards cloud gaming which is their particular strength. I'm okay with that, but there should be a matter of perspective here. Most definitely Sony and Nintendo will be doing everything to keep as many players stuck on hardware as much as possible and pushing regulators to slow the advance of games moving to streaming. And MS will do the opposite, unfortunately ceding control to Ubisoft for ABK properties likely set them back significantly more than expected.
