Second place at best.

They won marketshares, but not profit nor image, that's one of the many reason why Wii U is not selling great.

I always thought MS dominated last gen.

Kinect 1 is the fastest selling device of all time. (Faster than any iPhone), and finished pretty well in total sales.
2nd place in hardware sales, over 84 million
#1 in subscriptions
#1 is most retail games sold
#1 in arcade games sold
#1 in marketplace purchases (movies/tv/avatar items/whatever)

Most active online community of any console last gen

Redemption?  You can't redeem your way into better hardware!  The best they could do is offer it at a discount compared to the more powerful PS4.  They are still trying to market it as equal or better than the competition... THAT is their Biggs problem right now.  People KNOW, at this point, that it is not equal.... And MS PR is just making it worse.  The public perception is very negative right now, and I don't see that changing.

Well that is still up in the air of who actually took 2nd place. It's so close that it's scary.

There are 3 dinosaurs.

1 is clever and flies around effectively to survive.

1 is just meat headed and burly and uses brute strength to survive.

1 is also meat headed and burly but has fire breath giving him a double edge easily defeating his meat headed copy and having a hard time catching the flying one because he is so different.

Now tell me which dinosaur represents each of the 3 big names in gaming: Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony.

The 1 that is clever and flies around effectively to survive is Nintendo. I say that because the media and such mainly focuses on the other 2 while Nintendo is doing their own thing.

The meat headed and burly brute strength one is Microsoft. I've concluded that because MS is so financially stable and has the ability to pretty much buy anything. They have proved that by securing the most stable servers and purchasing studios to helm 1st party games.

Lastly, Sony would be the remaining dino. The direct competition with Microsoft evens them both out. However, Nintendo is crapping all over Sony with the handhelds. I believe that's what your last sentence was referencing.

Dinalingaling! You got it. That's how it has been for some time now. Microsoft just does what Sony does. No, let me rephrase that.... Xbox One does whatever the PS4 does. So why should there be room for 2 hospitals and only one bank!?(Dr. Phil language here).

YES!! Did I totally win a can of Beef Ravioli?

Fastest selling is a dubious at best measurement for lifetime device success, and considering the massive investment they had in the machine, I'd like to see some hard numbers before I'd call the Kinect anything more than a short lived failure. They've desperately tried to subsidize it for 2 gens now, and finally seem to be throwing in the towel. Though, it did sell well initially, so this claim may be valid. However, success of the kinect is not necessarily success of the Xbox. Accessory sales have never really been used in "who won the gen" discussions before, why should they now? I'm not saying they shouldn't, but how we declare a winner of an imaginary title requires we all be measureing the same thing, otherwise this is utterly meaningless.

#1 in subscriptions? The best selling console of the gen didn't offer a subscription service and the PS3 didn't start doing it until well in to the generation. So what was the competition? Sure it was number 1, but by that reasoning the n-gage was the number 1 selling taco shaped phone.

It did not sell the most software.http://www.vgchartz.com/platforms/ Its short by 26 million. The Wii won software sales.

It sold the most marketplace purchases? Ok, that may be true. That has never had anything to do with measuring console success before, and the other consoles placed little to no emphasis on it, so sure it was number one, but that's not really what's being measured in the discussion. Maybe it should be, but considering the massive losses the 360 took on the whole, I don't think they're all that excited about this particular #1. Also, what's the margin on something like that? I can't imagine NBC is dying to give microsoft a massive cut of the 2 dollars you spent to download the new episode of Heroes in 2006.

Most active online community? Ok now you're measuring by wildly different standards. The Wii wasn't even designed around an online community at all. It has no bearing on financial success or overall popularity (outside a specific subset demographic). There is no reason for this to be part of the measurement unless we're just talking about the system we "liked" the best. I don't personally care one bit about online gaming, so I could list the Wii's lack of an online community as an upside and since neither has an effect on profitability, there's no objective way to resolve it.

Also, Re: Goulibouli,

What loss did they take on the Wii in terms of profit? It was the only console that gen which was sold at a profit from day 1, and continued to do so its entire lifespan. Any source of this claim?

Loss of image? Arguably, but that's 1) subjective, 2) unmeasureable, and 3) deals more with the entire lifespan of the company, not that particular generation of hardware which is the topic at hand.