this.

also if you view any live podcast or interview you will know phil isn't much of an actor but looks quite genuine about his vision/direction.

There is no war: if you are selling your hardware and making good proft, and 3rd party is also making good money in it, and giving you extra profit from their efforts, you are golden, you are good.
If you can achieve such a status selling 10 million units, great, if you achieve such selling 100 million units, awesome.
But if you sell 200 million consoles at a loss and no one is making profit, then you are a idiot.

I see no problem with what he said here, or most of the stuff he says about gaming in general. He didn't say that its wrong to root for your system of choice. He said its not cool to be an asshole about it. That's just common sense. Everyone should agree with that.

(To prove my non-fanboyness: I own a XBoneS, PS4P, WiiU, and 3DS. I will own a Switch sometime as well. I, or my family when I was a child, have owned every major console since Atari 2600, with the exception of the original NES. I have owned all handhelds except the original Gameboy, and Vita)

This.

Also Spencer is a marketing face. I don't believe anything that comes out of his marketing mouth. All that matters is what products are actually released by his department.

Calling console wars stupid is ironically a marketing strategy for the console wars anyway.

Dudes the front man for the brand, do you think he's going to pass up the opportunity to sell it?
Do you think a car dealership will sit on their laurels if their cars are a little cheaper than the lot across the street, or do you think they're going to make a big deal out of it and draw attention to it?

It's all PR, dudes doing his job, nothing more nothing less.

Look at when the 360 was ahead of the PS3, did Microsoft's Xbox department as a whole go out of their way to say to everyone "now now, be nice, all games are good on any platform!", did they fuck, they rode that pony till it was glue, just like Sony are riding theirs now, it's PR, that's what you do.

Their new plan kind of kills the problem of " If your "piece of plastic" doesn't sell well then that console dies and no more games come to it"

They are ending the generation "reboot", that reboot happening every five/6 years,  and forces you to sell all your old games and consoles because they are now useless.

The problem with that, and why almost every new generation, a new company is leading the market , is that when every manufacturers tells you to throw away everything you bought during the last 6 years and start again from scratch with a new one, you can tell yourself "well, I might as well jump ship and buy another brand this time".

The alternative Microsoft is bringing with scorpio and the next Xbox consoles, is a way of retaining users. They tell you : " you can keep everything, you don't even have to buy a scorpio, we'll make sure scorpio games will be compatible with your old Xbox One. You can upgrade whenever you want for a new model, but nobody is forcing you".

They do all that, because the real money isn't in selling hardware, because those things are sold with an awful profit margin, ranging from tight to "at a loss", the real money is in games, digital content, Gold memberships, and so on.

So their new plan is to make sure you don't leave the Xbox/windows ecosystem,  for Phil Spencer, the console war and the "piece of plastic" VS "piece of plastic" is kind of irrelevant.

Because, if when the PS5 comes out, Sony says "you have to sell all your stuffs to buy new stuffs", basically Sony and their costumers are again back to square one. Microsoft meanwhile, with the scorpio or the next model, will just grow from the user base they started with the Xbox One..

Or it could just as well turn out that the Scorpio will get a pitch for an awesome new game that really cannot run on the X1 and Microsoft will allow it in fear of missing out on a new massive IP. Same for Sony. The PS5 will be backwards compatible from today's point of view, but if some developer comes up with something that really requires all of the new console's power, Sony might allow things on the PS5 that will not run on PS4 or even PS4P. Point being that both MS and Sony are exactly in the same boat, neither one is holier than the other in this regard and their future intentions will become clear only with time.

Am I the only one who finds him disingenuous? He's trying way too hard to be the nice guy of the industry, with his console currently getting beat in sales and very little to show in the games department.

He wouldn't talk like this if Xbone was winning by 30 million and their 1st party was kicking Sony in the butt.

Less talk and more action please.

He always struck me as somebody who want to perpetuate the anti-consumer state of console wars (anti-consumer in that you end up needing to buy multiple platforms to get all the games) but who is required to perpetuate it because of his job.
But he seems to be having trouble reconciling the two. Xbox has certainly been blowing it this generation, but I have no idea if that's because of his leadership.

Its because Microsoft is losing. Spencer is smart, he knows when to play passive to dismiss long conversations about their flaws. Humility makes it easy for people to overlook the true situation. With that said, hes not naive and hes working on the problem. We will see the fruits of his labor as boss come E3. If Spencer said theres no console war, then hes lying to the face of every consumer.  I think he is anti fanboyism.