I'll repost what I did when I saw this at Wired:
Good post from Harris, but we should account for another historical trend... Which is that XBox has historically sold roughly 500K every November, and 1M in December. Harris himself posted the 470K for Nov 02 and 480K for Nov 03, while in Nov 06 XBox360 did 511K. (November 2004 saw over 700K sold thanks to Halo 2.)
From Jan-Aug 2007 XBox360 has not vastly outperformed previous years, and the October 366K included the tail end of the Halo spike. November shouldn't be expected to follow a 2.5x increase to over 900K. If the numbers for Nov show 650K XBox360s sold, it would be a surprisingly high number, not a surprisingly low one.
And as for PS3, we should also consider that a lot of the traditional November bump likely comes from Black Friday and the last week of the month. So a big bump early in November for PS3 is probably significant. But then it probably isn't "the breakthrough we've been waiting for" for Sony, either, especially considering Nintendo came back and basically said "we still sold more."
"[Our former customers] are unable to find software which they WANT to play."
"The way to solve this problem lies in how to communicate what kind of games [they CAN play]."
Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President. Only slightly paraphrased.
