I'll translate.

"Even with Kinect, we still lost out to the Wii in North America this holiday. Don't expect us to win!"

jk jk

Well technically this week = last week, so yeah possibly, but I wouldn't bank much on it though. Although Americas fall for X360 does seem considerably harsh. We'll see how the numbers stack up next week, or this week lol.

So, what could MS do with plenty of shipments arriving too late for Xmas by, er, ship (sorry for the unavoidable pun  )? Say, trying to steal some thunder from a competitor's big launch, like it already did with Forza bundles started during GT5 launch, this time, instead, flooding stores with Kinect-360 4GB bundles at $200-220 (*) time limited offer during 3DS launch? Knowing MS, I wouldn't rule it off, not fair at all, but business is business, and against Sony it worked fine (although Sony will almost surely retaliate with heavy GT5 bundling during Forza 4 launch), so why not be more ambitious and aim at Nintendo next time?

(*) It shouldn't lose money on such offer, if the rumours about standalone Kinect production cost at ~$50 are true, just break even at worst, without counting successive games purchases and possible XBL Gold subscriptions.

ship is not a pun of shipments, shipments is derived from ship.

Though you are right it will be interesting what happens come restocking time.

I doubt MS will flood the market with Kinects when 3DS comes out. Portables and consoles, besides whichever way it goes 3DS first shipment is likely to sell out in 2-3 weeks time, so they won't be affected much.

What would be interesting is whether MS will flood the market with Reach bundles when KZ3 comes out lol.

It would mean crediting KZ3 as peer with Halo, while defying 3DS would be a lot more bold and ambitious, and 3DS will attract a lot more people into shops, so it's a far bigger opportunity to take lucky shots, not to mention that 3DS is rumoured to be very expensive, so a crazy offer on a big bundle could really sway a lot of people that will come to shops to see the 3DS but will be undecided until the last moment and could be deterred by a price very high for a portable.

And there's also another reason: Kinect defied Balance Board, and in USA, where the latter wasn't bundled, it won. MS could have very good reasons to think that keeping on fighting against Sony for 2nd place won't take it very far, and struggling for it gives it a bad image return too, while starting fighting for 1st place won't bring a WW victory , by now, but it could give it some nice satisfactions, regional victories and more prestige.

So this is what I believe happened. 

In early December MS sold out of units shipped via normal methods (boats mostly). This was because of better then expected demand for Kinect in November. So they in essence ran out.

To alleviate the December problem MS put units just built into planes rather than container ships and got them to market ASAP. Still there was about a week of little to no units to be found.  Over the course of a week I found 2 Kinect Sensors and 1 4GB 360 with Kinect and was able to sell all of them on Amazon for about $75 above retail.  Then found 1 more sensor and 1 more 4GB 360 later in the month well it turned out so did everyone else and you saw that on Amazon where all of a sudden the resale market dried up the last week plus as the air shipped units arrived.

So now those units that should be arriving now via boat were in stores end of December and now and since no container ships are arriving with product for a few weeks availability will dwindle.

Actually, I just went to Best Buy, and this is true. I only saw 1 XB 360, but 10 or more PS3's and Wii's. It was never this bad, even when Wii had shortages.