Will this stock stuff be affected if the next xbox is a total failure as expected?

Only fanboys don't consider the possibility.

Dang! I should have bought some!

Well, I hope my Dad listened when I told him to buy.

I think they will initially lose money on the new Xbox - as the hardware will probably be very expensive. But they should be doing rather well with Surface 2.0 and other products.

Is there a specific reason for such a big increase? Or is it just a combination of all the success they've been having lately?

Most likely a combination of things, strong financial reports, Microsoft making a bunch of good deals lately, Xbox announcement, more companies signing patent licenses with Microsoft for Android, and so on and so forth. :)

It is due to their success. Despite declining PC sales their profit continued to increase, especially in cloud, mobile, gaming and enterprise software markets. Windows 8 despite all the doom merchants hasn't been a flop sales wise (though it hasn't been fantastic either, just solid). Also their shareprice has never been this cheap, yes their stock has bounced roughly around the same numbers for a decade, but the actual underlying business hasn't. They have massively increased revenue and profit and their shareprice was arguably way way overvalued back in the dotcom boom and even post boom where they were trading in the 20-30 PE range. They now trade at a PE of just 17 and a forward PE of 11 making them priced as a blue chip stock with plenty of opportunity to grow.

Wow I'm so freaking happy today! My dad bought some Ms stocks back in 2001 and beside from the occasional 37$ we got one time it has seriously been dead money(excl. Dividends).
To everyone who says 33$ a share is nothing then think again cuz' this has been a 5 year high that has constantly been a point that we just can't cross so to finally cross it shows strength!

Yeah people like to forget that MS is the most diversed tech-company out there.
Apple is the iPhone / iPad. The iPod is on its way out and the company makes 2/3 of its profits with the iPhone.

Google is the search engine. It is their product, their market. Besides that, there is Android, which makes more money for MS than Google, and ... yeah ... Google glasses maybe?

MS has Windows, Office and Server and Tools as 3 main sources for profit. Windows 8 is doing fine, but people expected it to do incredibly well. So while talking about Windows 8 and how it "failed" to do what others expected, they forgot that Office 365, Azure, MS SQL Server are doing FANTASTIC (up 11% YoY).

We haven't seen anything from it and people make crazy shit decisions in this crazy shit world. Well, it kind of depends what 'total failure" actually conveys.

Funny, I was being sarcastic and everything degenerated.