Microsoft may be testing the waters with a more profitable fallback position should the XB1 never really take off. The XB1 as it now exists is already a pale shadow of what they clearly wanted it to be : a massive paywall money printing press that cha-chinged every time you did anything at all in your living room.
As it now stands the console is about neutral on a per-unit basis, and they only make $$ on game and XBLG sales. That works great if you're a market leader, and not so great if you're on track to sell less than half of your last-gen global totals for the gen.
On PC however, if they can sell 2M of this, 4M of that, 10M of their various major IPs on a consistent basis, they could rake serious $$$ in.
With DX12 making PCs much more graphically efficient, and iGPU getting rapidly more powerful, PC gaming could be a cash cow for them. 100M PS4s? "That's okay, how bout 900M DX12-ready Win9 PCs.?"
Xbox as a project is still many billions in the hole. Slim profits from the tail end of 360 couldn't balance the overall numbers from the OG and RROD money pits.
In retrospect, if they had built Steam themselves, they could have really brought gaming forward and made tens of billions in profits over the same period of time by building studios and releasing top-notch games. They could even have made a lightweight gaming-centric Windows edition that was low-overhead and had the XBL frontend ready to go.
They were terrified that Sony was going to take over the living room and threaten their bottom line, a truly monumentally stupid idea. What actually happened is they got blindsided by Google and Apple, who are the new 21st century titans that threaten Microsoft as mobile continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
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