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Machiavellian on 17 July 2014
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Intrinsic said:
Machiavellian said:

I personally do not know MS gameplan but I can definitely say that they have one even if they had to scrap their first one and redo it.  The end result is not going to be what we see today and the X1 will be a totally different product in 2 years.

No argument there. But MS isn't competing in a vacum. The have competition in the PS4 and its kicking their ass. And everything you said about their OS, has nothing to do with the fact that its still weaker hardware compared to their competition and said competition has the all important mindshare momentum going for it so far.

Simply put, what happens in 2/3yrs when MS miraculously turns things around with the XB1 but at that point the PS4 has 50M consoles sold to the XB1's 25M?

In the console biz, historically; there has never been a time when two consoles launched at the same time and whichever console took the lead ended up losing it before the gen ended. Right now its saf eto say that MS isn't rally competing with the PS4 anymore, they are competing with the wiiU.

Yes, the PS4 is winning but a war is not won by the first salvos.  There is a long march for both the X1 and PS4 and who knows how things would turn out in a few years. There is nothing guaranteeing that the PS4 will be 50M or even 25M in 2 years.  Gamers are fickle and it only takes a few stumbles to slow momentum. 

The other point is that MS nor Sony really need to be the market leader, instead they need to sell strong and make a profit.  Improving your product and increasing its reach while maintaining profit is more important than having a few million more product in the market.  In business success is not only defined by how many products you sell but instead how many products you sell at a profit and how much growth you can expand the business.  Do not confuse the fanboy number games that goes on in these forums to how a business operates.

As to the OS, you did not get what I was saying.  Forward thinking mean that they are not dependant on the current hardware.  This means if MS move to a different hardware infrastructure or decided they want to do a Playstation Now service, it will be eaiser for them to keep backward compatibility and deliver those services faster because the OS is run from a VM.  That VM could be deployed within the next iteration of the Xbox hardware or used within Azure to spin up X1 system for game streaming.