Why doesn't he just shut up? He keeps serving up fanboy fodder.

It is like Sony with the PSVita. 1.5 : 6 looks quite bad! 

So with that logic they could ship 1 million consoles. 10 of those consoles get sold. But as long as those 10 are actively being used AKA XBOX live account is active then Microsoft is happy. The other 999,990 never sell or sell super slowly compared to last gen. And all those unsold consoles net you no money and there is the possibility that those unsold consoles never touch and XBOX Live server before us several months to years old. Less money will grant less finance to put towards new IPs to stir up sales again.

He probably does not but then again you have to think about a game MS spent millions on for 5 years and suddenly decide not to spend more.  That speak volumns.  When a company just cut their losses like that, you can believe the game was no where close to getting finished and the current state was not good.

I think I got Haze like 6 months after it was released. And completed it. I think if that game came out this gen now that Sony is doing so much better it would have sold better. 

It a combination of things.  As you stated MS is definitely more concerend about userbase on their services since they have become a service oriented company.  Also when you are getting hammered by the competition, what gains do you get for releasing hardware sales numbers.  Since there is no benifit, it really would be silly to release those number as it doesn't help MS at this stage of the Xone lifecycle.

On one hand, this is silly because obviously you want to sell more units. Every market leader is happy to promote units sold.

On the other, I do understand how each unit sold is not of equal value. Gamer A spends ~$1000/year on gaming on average over a system life cycle. Compare that to Gamer B that spends ~$100/year on gaming and makes sense one is more desirable.

Is it really that bad though if the Switch would sell 8-10 million units a year 50% of Vgchartz would point out the Switch is a success. Sure the PS4 is doing insane numbers, but the Xbox 360 didn't sell bad because the WII pulverized everything.

That's probably the real reason, but the reason they gave is a good one too. Hardware sales numbers themselves aren't really a very good indicator because games are where the money's at.

the thread is specifically about hardware numbers, hardware numbers gives a good indication of an install base, active or otherwise.

Just because a (going off of his example), console is sat in someones cupboard unused, doesn't mean the owner won't take it out and play on it if the right game comes along.