If they will announce 599 US Dollars at E3 colour me convinced.

It isn't about wanting out of the game industry, they just want to morph it into something that better supports their computer/software industry. Just like how they morphed Windows to better reflect their attempt to control or gain access to the mobile industry, they are slowly trying to change the game industry to link up and better support a Microsoft hub of entertainment that they failed to create with Zune. They still care about gaming but to Microsoft gaming is just the gateway drug they use to try to get customers into more stuff so they can get more money.

Yeah but Sony isn't a dominant force in the TV market like Apple is in the MP3 player market.

It's not what is actually happening, but there is a valid reason for them to do it, if they wanted out of the gaming industry.

They have to justify their actions to investors. So simply leaving the market when it looks really lucrative is bad because investors will see it as giving up such a lucrative market. So instead, come up with plausible reasons for actions that have the net impact of ruining their reputation in the market, and suddenly it's not so lucrative anymore.

It's pretty much what a number of companies did with the Wii, because they didn't want to work on it - they released low-quality titles under the auspices of "testing the waters", and when people didn't buy the low-quality stuff, they went "see, our products don't sell on Wii". It's how they sold it to their investors.

MS and Apple have always been friends, actually. Apple never wanted the rest of the PC market. MS's Mac Business Unit has existed since 1997 making for example Office for Mac.

No, like I said, it's not what is actually going on here. There's no way that MS are actually doing it. I was just making the point that there are justifications for that sort of activity (ruining reputation because you don't want to be in a certain market, rather than just not releasing a product for that market).

Please pay attention to context of posts in future.

If this is all one big conspiracy why stop there?

Maybe it's part of a plot by the military and the greys that will eventually enslave us all. This is just the part where we're all laboratory rats. So just remember when you're wanking off and that Kinect camera is zooming down that there're some greys at the other end taking notes...

01010100 01110010 01110101 01110011 01110100 00100000 01101110 01101111 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101

Clearly not, since you quite explicitly claimed that I was saying something that my very first sentence, which you had quoted, had explicitly ruled out.