| kowenicki said: Good summary. Valid observations you have there I think. But it does make me laugh when people act as though MS have to get shareholder permission to do something. Sure, they have shareholders, just like Sony and Ninty (though Ninty is slightly different). Fully listed companies dont ask shareholders for permsission or even opinion when they make business decisions. |
Well true, companies don't have to take permission from their share holders per say, but te board of directors is made up of the most prominent share holders and they usually speak for the rest of them. Its no secret that the Xbox brand is not very popular in the house of Microssoft right now. Proposing anything that could mean biting a $200M bullet won't be very well supported. $200M is what MS will lose if they lost $200 on every XB1 sold based on a swap system for every 1M swaps.
Funny enough, if you think about it... $200M isn't that bad if it would mean that that you could build your install base quickly. I eman think about it, spend $1B and gurantee that you increase your user base by 5M in record time or spend $1B on marketing and have zero effect on your user base.
