Microsoft honestly fucked up the whole balance of the console market.
If there was no XBox the GameCube I think would have been far better appreciated and given more room the breathe for what it is was ... significantly better hardware than the PS2 with some good exclusivity deals (Resident Evil 4! MGS Twin Snakes, etc. etc.) and would have sold more like 35-40 million units.
But MS was worried that Playstation was going to control the living room somehow and none of that ever came to pass. People just use their Playstation to play games on and maybe watch Netflix on and that's it. It was no threat to Windows at all. Instead Microsoft was paying no attention to Apple who actually created the next line of OS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod) and then Google was even faster to the punch with Android and MS effectively locked itself out of the mobile device market entirely. Massive fail.
In hindsight, both MS and Nintendo would've been far better off if MS agreed to stay out of the game hardware business but agreed to stake Nintendo's hardware as a hedge against Sony. So Halo is available for GameCube + PC and they bring other console exclusives to the GameCube while having them on PC too. And they help Nintendo set up an online network since that was obviously out of their wheelhouse. Stuff like that.
They accomplished very little with the XBox brand other than waste a shit ton of money, it's 25 years in and really they're no closer to beating Sony than they were 25 years ago.
