No, it was the shitty practices they were trying to force on gamers. Don was just the idiot infront of the dumbass brigade.

I voted for "we dont know", but you've got a point there.

Guilty.

It really was a PR disaster but what was the reasons for it?
I looked trough a timeline to see what was really the problem for the shitstorm. 

Always online? We all are always online and want to be very much. Whitout it we are bored as hell. They had sorted out the few cases when you were compleatly outside of civilisation and still wanted to play games.

Preventing piracy? Almost everyone, except the pirates themselves, knows how pirating hurt sellers AND buyers of games. Money is going in the wrong directions not benefitting the talents or the consumers.

Kinect always on? Please, in these times of NSA and cellphones who really believes we are NOT monitored for both commercial and security reasons?

Used games? Maybe a problem, If all went according to MS plans (piracy prevention) maybe the prices of new games would go down and reselling would not be an issue anymore. Anyway, for the USA they had a reasonable sollution.

And what was flushed down with all this? - Family sharing - Accesing your games from any Xbox - The possible removal of physical copies. and more.

In the end I think we were set back a couple of years in ease of use and the possibilities of modern technology.

For the record: I am a Nintendo gamer and Xbox is my least wanted console, I consider it a shooterbox.

But MS itself transformed it into a shitstorm. They could have used all those new features as an INCENTIVE and REWARD for users CHOOSING to stay online and with Kinect turned on, without trying to force always online, Kinect always on and without trying to kill used games market and cutting off users that for any reasons don't want or just cannot be always online. All those new things offered without trying to force the users in any way would have been a TOTAL PR victory and an excellent launch for those new features. But no, too fair and too simple, paranoid and power-hungry Lardmer couldn't live without trying to take control of his users lives...

Mattrick was pretty arrogant about it all. But yeah the world of gaming wasn't ready for the sort of thing microsoft proposed

The message had a lot to do with it but dont confuse the guy on stage for the company and behind the scenes decisions.

Again, you have to account for the ebb and flow of the competition and MSFT hit a double while sony hit a HR. MSFT can bunt their runner third with a price cut and then sac fly him in with compelling software. the problem is sony has other batters coming up too so it might not just be 1-1 by the time they do that. Thats how this thing works as proven last gen except last gen Sony struck out looking and MSFT hit a grandslam so it took years to catch up haha. MSFT is in a better position than Sony was in last gen but, again, we will have to see how all of these companies react to each other.

I have no idea how complicated it would've been to execute and maintain BOTH strategies with one console, or how confusing that message would be for consumers in general, but I'm guessing it wouldn't have worked out as cleanly and neatly as we or MS would've liked.

As someone that got Google Fiber two weeks before the One launched, I sure would've loved the original plan personally, but c'est la vie ...

I don't know practically, but conceptually it would just have been "if you're offline for more than a given time you cannot use anymore the advanced features", while for Kinect it's simply "if you turn it completely off you can't use voice wake-up" (this one is quite obvious and surely simple to implement too). As for used games, it would be simple too, once the new owner registers his used copy (and he should, to have full control of it outside of offline SP), the old owner's privileges are deactivated and he keeps only the achievements and stats he gained while still owning the game. Not having his copy anymore to regularly check it online with his online account, most of the privileges and features would be lost anyway a few hours after giving away his copy, only one user at a time, owning the physical copy and being the last to have registered it could have full rights and privileges. Imposing, say, a week as minimum period before being able to register a game with another account could prevent tricks to abuse the system, while used games stores could be asked to pay a small fee if they need to unlock the system after a shorter period.
Having ditched all because users didn't want FORCED always online and crippled user games market looks more like a Ballmer-style retaliation rather than a true implementation problem. What makes me suspect it, besides conceptual simplicity, is also the far milder approach MS started having once Ballmer was gone. And here we're back to Mattrick and the OP, I think he was clumsy, but mostly innocent apart that, as thinking the troubles were solved (or better, the initial causes of the troubles, as the PR backlash lasted a lot longer) just because he went away would mean largely overestimating the power he had in the company.

It's a conspiracy I tell ya~!

Mattrick was working for Elop. They wanted the X1 to fail, so they can sell it off.

Thankfully they were broken apart before they got what they wanted but be warned Elop is still on the move.

-queue villain music-

Larry Herb is a PR man, he gets told what to say and he goes out there and says it. It's not his fault in the slightest if he is handed a sheet of facts to be agressive with in interviews about if the people who wrote the sheet of facts see the reaction to them and change their mind after it.

Looking at sales figures of the xbox360 dropping more and more it's clear that gamers aren't even taking the bit of advice that Don Mattick gave them when they were upset about an always online system. That slip up when asked what he thought those gamers should do... that... was Matticks worst mess up with the gaming community and the X1 imo.