While the intelligent thing to do in business would be to gather information to make and support a decision before it is made, a lot of executives (even in very large and successful businesses) make a decision and then look for information in the aftermath of that decision to support it.
Many publishers decided that they were going to heavily support the HD consoles in the last generation and allocated all of their best developers to these platforms, gave them massive budgets, had them work on established IPs in popular genres, and then supported these games with huge marketing budgets. At the same time they allocated their weaker teams to the Wii, restricted them to tiny budgets, had them work on new IPs in unconventional genres, and gave them very limited marketing budgets. After the games were released executives would add up the sales of these big budget games across the XBox 360, PS3 and PC games and demonstrate that they outsold the far lower budget Wii game and use that as reason why they were right not to invest heavily in the Wii.
If you could get access to the internal financial statements of many large publishers you would find that their numbers do not match the strategy they took in the previous generation. The ROI of games on the Nintendo DS and Wii in many cases indicated far greater support than the HD consoles when you factored in everything.
Nintendo will put their best development teams, using their biggest IPs, with healthy budgets, and strong marketing support on their platforms. So the net result of this misallocation of resources is similar to what would happen if you took 8 professional sporting teams and had them play in a league with 22 minor league teams. The minor league teams will do alright against eachother, and may win the occasional game against one of the professional teams, but the professional teams will dominate the league.
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