12 months ago, there was much chatter about how the WiiU had a good to great launch.  Shortly after, the system was instock everywhere.  The initial rush of core gamers bought the system, but the casual crowd chose to ignore it.

I am of the opinion(see OP) that the XB1 had a good to great launch.  I am also of the opinion that there shouldn't be PILES of the systems sitting in stores 7 weeks after it launched, especially right after the Christmas holiday season.  This isn't caused by M$ doing a great job in production or choosing to sell in fewer countries.  It is because they have already sold to the early adopters/fanboys(I am one).  The whole OP is predicated on the casual crowd.

So, they need to be saved from themselves.  If not, they will have learned nothing from the guys over at Nintendo.  They need to be proactive and go to the next level to keep up with Sony.  Like I said in above posts, it's not about a ssales crown, as second place is fine.  It's about not getting too far behind and losing all momentum like the WiiU.

so you are comparing it to the wii u launch? yeah ok buddy, I was of the impression that it took the wii u about a year to do what the x1 did in 2 months......easy comparison, the similarity is uncanny.

People say MS should drop the price. Great.
But the thing is,
Sony can equally do so... In fact more so, because they don't have Kinect bundled.

IMHO Kinect is not going to see equivalent decreases in manufacturing costs as the main hardware,
because even if a new camera type was cheaper, it's performance characteristics would be different,
which would be a bad thing to do when the Kinect control software sensitivity is already panned as so-so:
Having two different camera models creating different data for the same gestures would wreak havok.
So they can't change it. That cost is fixed as long as it is bundled.
The rest of it, they can't really reduce costs any more than Sony can.

All the market data is saying that Sony has massive pent up demand, that they could sell more at current price.
This means that a further price drop would tend to give them even more new sales,
as long as they can increase production to fulfill that new price-sensitive demand (on top of existing demand).
In other words, Sony could see sales increases WITHOUT dropping the price, just by increasing production,
but if they also dropped the price they would see disproportionately more (than MS would).
MS would be seeing less than half of that potential increase,
and the increase wouldn't be starting above their current production (like it is for sold-out Sony),
it would be starting by helping clear their current production that they can't sell.

If all the signs are pointing to this level of demand and market perception domination by Sony,
it's 110% in it's interests to drop the price as much as they can now if they can increase production enough
so that the sales difference compensates... (increasing forced bundling if necessary to not lose $ short-term)
Since they could get more out of a price drop (if they can also increase production enough),

i.e. the financial prospects for such a move can conservatively be forecast to result in disproportinately more sales,

I don't see why they wouldn't do so, especially if faced with the potential of MS doing so,
but even in the absence of that there is plenty of logic to boosting sales, especially in the USA market,

where MS is doing OK, but Sony would like to have 'total domination' now that the rest of the world is mostly in it's pocket.

(increasing production for markets like Brazil, ideally locally, would have similar logic, albeit USA is the biggest current market)

I'm not comparing it to the back end of a console's life cycle. I'm comparing this launch to the 360 launch. Microsoft was able to evolve the 360 over the course of eight years to keep it relevant (even with the whole RROD debacle, of which I'm convinced stopped MS from walking all over Sony). They will do the same thing with the Xbox One. They aren't afraid of change in this way.

What I think will come into play in the next 1-2 years is the Xbox One versatility. The all-in-one living room set top box for entertainment, if marketed right, could get people to buy the console who plan on never playing a single game. Right now, their marketing has focused on these things a little, but overall the emphasis has been on games. As the price comes down, we'll see ads touting the other services without a mention of gaming.

Since when does a launch last 8 years?
And now a "relaunch" is still included within the "launch"?
How many fingers am I holding up?

Of course, from the too talls height,you can only see the big numbers.  try looking at the sales pattern along with a total sales number.  The sales pattern mixed with the extremely high in stock levels is what I am comparing.  Please try to follow along.

I have read that given both platform's extreme closeness to standard PC hardware,
and the regular improvements in CPU manufacturing processes, etc,
it will be very easy and fast for both of them to move to cheaper manufacturing nodes,
and they can be expected to do so early and on a regular basis... by next Christmas holiday wouldn't surprise me,
although I think (especially) Sony might not really change their external casing at all with that.
(Sony is also supposed to want to include a minorly beefed up auxiliary CPU to enable more low power state usage)

It doesn't include any of those.

I'm saying, comparing 360 to One launch, the One is a huge success. And over time, with Microsoft's ability to evolve a console, things will be fine. This is in answer to the theme of the post about the XOne needing to be saved. It doesn't.

Can you stick your cable into the Xb1 and get rid of your old cable box.... NO.  So its never gonna be a product for any one who does not play games.  Its a freaking add on to your cable box, most wont care for that especially at what it costs.

This is similar to the same BS we heard years ago how the consoles are a threat to PC and will blahhblahh blahh 

OK, it's just baffling when people call out linking the two items,
that you continue to link them even while claiming some difference.
Great. They're different, so don't link them together.

The 360's launch was way better than the XBone's in terms of market share, RROD not withstanding.
Due to network effects like buying what your friends play on, establishing early market share lead is important for overall marketshare and lifetime sales. XBone and 360 launches are just not equivalent there.

XBone's persistent lead was not just due to Year 1 sales with the remainder being up to "improvements"... Network effects stemming from that Year 1 lead (and PS3 not really competing for several years after it launched, due to the hardware being hard to develop for) were what drove the 360's persistent lead and large net marketshare thru much of it's lifetime. PS3 in fact eventually overtook it worldwide (not in core US/UK markets) *in the face of this development of 360*, so those developments in fact weren't driving 360's success: they were just stemming the tide against the late-in-the-game "realized" PS3, whose sales festered for SEVERAL years (after it's 1 year launch delay) before it really came into it's own... At which point 360's marketshare quickly declined, especially in ongoing sales (not accumulated sales from when PS3 was no-show). RROD was a financial hit for MS in the short term, but establishing early and persistent market dominance was the important thing, even if it would be more perfect to not suffer RROD issue.

I mean, it makes sense to be happy about future development of the XBone platform if you have one and like it and want it to be better, but it's not really a marketshare shifting thing. Sony will also be developing it's platform. Including multimedia, online TV/movies type of features, and voice recognition, PSEye games, and... (duhduhduh) "cloud integration".

XBone does not seem set to repeat a 'come from behind' PS3 type of performance because it doesn't have the slow-to-materialize advantages that PS3 had (more power even if it is hard to tap, blueray winning the format war). This gen, MS has:
Lower marketshare (with even core 360 markets not showing an underlying demand advantage, with PS4's sales sold out), which leads to network effects for future sales,
Higher price (without offering a perceived value like Blu-Ray, while Kinect2 doesn't seem to be attacting broader interest: even MS launch exclusives that touted it during development ending up removing/reducing it's gameplay importance),
and both lower performance AND more restrictive to code for (DDR+ESRAM vs. GDDR).
Basically, like taking the disadvantages of PS3 and throwing away the advantages.

But the good thing is that both platforms were designed to be more economical from the start, so both can be profitable and healthy in terms of ongoing development even if the XBone has less marketshare, even 30% worldwide (vs PS4). Obviously there will be implications for both platforms if one has very strong dominance (as milked by 360 lastgen with PS3 only coming into it's own very late), but MS should be able to continue investments in it even if they give up on the hope of even 40/60 marketshare. Honestly, given the experience of last-gen, I don't think that MS ever expected to do as well this gen as last with Sony launching simultaneously this time (and having learned alot of lessons from PS3), so I don't think MS will necessarily be all that far off their expectations. Although unsold merchandise would go against that reading, so maybe they really are true believers who fell for unrealistic expectations.

Honestly, if MS continues underperforming marketshare-wise, it may be in it's interests (probably in a few years' time of worsening marketshare) to ditch MS' unique requirement that online game servers be XBone-only, which is a restriction that Sony itself doesn't impose. As the underdog, it may be easy to sell the console for it's exclusives if it can also play (multiplatform) games with a majority who own PS4. And that seems like a good thing for gamers, to me.