Maybe Nintendo should buy the Xbox division from Microsoft. lol

Seriously though, i am thinking that its a a strong possibility that Microsoft kills the Xbox. The X1 is not doing well in europe and has no chance in Japan. It will be a 1 region console and even on that region its losing to Sony. For the situation to change, Microsoft is gonna need to take losses on the X1. Will they be willing to? Or will they just kill it?

I wonder...

Actually it's more like looking Ballmer in the face and saying "The decisions you've made over the last 10 years were a huge mistake"

I can understand wanting to get rid of Xbox and surface, neither have made much of a return on their total investment despite ungodly amounts of marketing money, but getting rid of Bing would just be plain stupid. Bing doesn't need to make money, it just needs to compete with Google.

That said i doubt MS will sell the Xbox brand. They are far too obsessed with this "controlling the living room" jazz.

I don't think MS's board can tolerate losses on the gaming division any longer. But they may find another company foolish enough to partner in spinoff effort that will take the losses.

I think Ballmer did good near-terms decisions and that's why they got him out from CEO because the long-terms decisions aren't showing results that the investidors and some others at MS wanted to see.

A new CEO was the right decision.

Now it will take time to see what this new CEO can do... while that he will receive a lot of presure for near-term results.

About Bing... no company create a service just to compete with Google... they need at least that Bing mantain itself (overall no loss or profit)... this is the mininum to mantain a service running... and Bing just had loss until now.

LOL, the gaming divisions losses are nothing, MS generates billions of profit each quarter gaurunteed. They've made more money in the last 3 months than Sony has in the last 10 years combined. 

The thing with investors is they can be short sighted. MS is kinda damned if they do/damned if they don't ... if they try to branch out with ventures like XBox and Surface some investors will cry about not making immediate monster profits, even though the company as a whole makes incredible profit year after year. 

But on the other hand you have the Apple scenario ... another company that's wildly profitable, yet their investors are crying because Apple isn't branching out enough with other products. 

MS could ditch the XBox, but in 10 years, their investors may be crying about why MS just sat around and watched Windows become irrelevant and didn't follow through on things like Surface and XBox. 

The board of directors and are obsessed with profits and the bottom line. If controlling the living room doesn't make them as much bucks as building better business software, they'll bow out. They'd rather do another $10 billion in enterprise software than another $1 billion in gaming.

It's not a question even of "can Xbox be profitable?" it's a matter of "with this amount of time, talent, and other resources, where do I actually make the most money?"

The last quarter was in fact their best ever -- but the legacy of Xbox on the financial side of things is not pretty. The gaming division didn't become profitable until 2010/2011, nearly 10 years into the Xbox brand's existence. A good lump of the profit actually comes from Android and Skype royalties, which have little to do with how profitable Xbox itself is.

If MS cedes the enterprise market because they were busy making games, I'm pretty certain the investors would be peeved about that.

It depends on how you evaluate products.  I completely agree if you have a golden goose (Windows) it makes sense to just count your billions and be happy. The concern is down the road if Microsoft concede whole markets to other companies the potential revenue they will lose out on.  15 years ago Apple was generally viewed as a joke, then they made a push into the MP3 player market (iPod), the phone (iPhone) and tablet (iPad) markets to see insane growth to the biggest company in the world (believe it is between them and Exxon-Mobil).  

I do not bame Microsoft for making the Zune, Windows phone or Surface.  The issue is more to do with execution than the idea of trying to make Microsoft a relevant brand.  Again, I get it from a short term view. the question is if WIndows ever slips and Microsoft has no diversity in its portfolio how would they cope? I doubt we'll see it in next 5-10 years, but tech is a volatile field.