You don't in your right mind declare a brand the most popular brand in the span of a year or even two. The consoles are cyclical so you have to go by generation at the very best, if not all-time sales (unless you're declaring it the year's most popular brand, for whatever it's worth).

How would you compare the legitimacy of selling the Playstation brand in light of its predominance against the legitimacy of selling the Wii brand in light of its argued predominance? You can't, because it's the Nintendo brand vs the Playstation brand. When people buy the DS, they know they're buying Nintendo, because Nintendo is a gaming brand in and of itself, by virtue of Nintendo's sole mission in gaming products. The Nintendo label is video games. I know, for companies like Sony and MS it doesn't work that way because games are a part of their corporate strategy. For Nintendo, the company, the label is video games. Food for thought.

Regardless, even HW put aside for the sake of simplicity, Sony-published SW sales numbers will never reach the heights Nintendo-published SW sales numbers. Back in the day vgchartz had the breakdown by publisher. Nintendo was consistently on top.

@articles. I mean it as "these types of articles", basically articles with little common sense.

They think its sidetracking MS from Apple tearing slowly at their marketshare. Apple has been hurting MS since they got into the gaming industry slowly but surely. Jobs is gone now so it might hurt Apple a bit.

That may be true, but it didn't come across in the article.

"Xbox is one of the areas of success for Microsoft and is cool to consumers, but it is perhaps time to assess whether this can ever be material to the overall company and might be more leveragable to a consumer-oriented company such as Samsung."

They see potential in the xbox because they see Samsung leveraging it. If Samsung could do it, why couldn't MS? I don't see it making sense.

Apple is gaining marketshare, what MS needs to do to get that back is not based on a money problem, but on a lack of management on the side of the market where they compete with Apple, which has nothing to do with the xbox.

I agree only if Xbox One fails. If it does, then I think MS should refocus Xbox in a similar position to Apple and Google and double up their tablet push.

Nah...I havent read a positive...well...anything from shareholders, especially the older ones, whenever MS has a shareholder meeting and they address their grievances. If they listened to them Xbox would be gone, but they don't.

They may have grievances, but what do they have to do with the xbox?

You say apple started to hurt them since they got into the gaming industry. That is not causation that's coincidence. Apple would have raped MS with or without xbox. Apple is a force that is unique in the universe, this far at least. Now with Jobs gone it could go in any direction.

The man was a revolutionary, greater than Bill Gates imho at least in philosophy. Don't get me wrong Gates is a great philanthropist, but he will never (as great as, as remembered as) Steve Jobs.

I explained it already, the shareholders complain because they think MS is spreading themselves thin. To be honest they have not been thinking straight since Apple became a refocused and unified the value of their products intergrating them with the IPod and bringing IPhones into the mix. MS cant stand when companies dominate whatever they are good at just by being good. In an industry where MS used to dominate because of lack of choice when you bought your PC Apple has shaken them up a bit in the states. Apple, Sony and Samsung are the reason MS have their hands in everything. MS has a monoply type mindset, they must dominate everything multimedia, OS isnt enough anymore for them. Shareholders dont care if its hurting them on their end and I guess thats been the case.

@bold. That makes no sense. They are a huge business with tons of money, and proper separation of their divisions. The xbox is certainly not what's hurting MS' OS market, it's pretty clear that Apple is giving them a hard time period, and I don't think there is much MS can do about it but try to increase their brand affection with the mainstream consumer which, ta-da, the xbox is achieving for them.

@underlined. For example, tell me how exactly Samsung is one of the reasons MS went with the xbox?

@MS OS not enough. That is just bs, you could say that about any company: Sony, Google, Apple all big companies want to diversify and expand so as to mitigate the risk of having all your eggs in one basket, and go fetch the next available piece of pie.

Tell that to the shareholders. MS non OS profits are nothing to them really as far as they are concerned.

As I said, MS is losing to Apple due to Apple's unrivaled brand power.  The only way MS can reverse that is by catering to the hearts of consumers by using more consumer-level products. They suggest Samsung instead but this is actually exactly what MS needs.

If shareholders don't understand that then they are stupid.