Why the Xbox One is losing to the PS4, according to the guy who made Xbox matter

[AbbathTheGrim]

Robert J. Bach, who was the President of Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft, was interviewed by Tech Insider on "So what went wrong?" after the success of the Xbox 360 to what he had the following to say:

"It's easy to be an armchair quarterback. It's easy to look in hindsight," Bach said when we asked him about the price point — again, $500 dollars, which was $100 more than the PlayStation 4's launch price — and how it seemed obviously too high, even from an outsider's perspective.

- When asked about the Xbox Team celebreation after Kaz Hirai revealed how expensive the PS3 would be against the cheaper Xbox 360 and how did the Micro ended up aiming for an expensive console he had the following to say:

"My back of the envelope belief is that they were having a trade off between how important Kinect is and how many games are going to support Kinect. If Kinect is an option, they get less game support. And the minute you make Kinect mandatory in the package — which is what they chose — now you have a pricing problem, because you have two controllers. And Kinect's not the cheap one."

"Once you make that decision, and you decide a Kinect is going to be in every box, you either have to decide you're going to lose money — and lose a fair amount of money — or you have to decide you're going to price point at a price that gets you into the right range."

- Bach also mentions a "shake-up" in management:

"Unfortunately, for the team, there was a lot going on at Microsoft at the time organizationally. They were getting ready to split up the Xbox group. Don Mattrick left right before the product launched. There was a lot of really difficult dynamics, that did not help decision making."

He says that the team that launched the Xbone was "was not the Xbox 360 team," and "naturally, they're going to approach things in a different way."

- On the Xbone marketing he said that the team behind the new Micro console:

"They made some awkward choices on marketing. They made some awkward choices in business practice. And Sony took advantage of that,"

- On the team behind Xbox and the console itself, he said:

I love that team, and I think the product's actually a great product. I think it will be successful in the marketplace over the life cycle, and I think they've made a lot of progress to improve its performance in the marketplace. So I think they're on a good trajectory and I feel really good about that.

But the idea that they're gonna price something at the price point they did? And have that be the only price point? It was just a mistake.

http://www.techinsider.io/how-microsoft-bungled-the-xbox-one-launch-2015-8