right Timing for the tax repay time
decent move

let's see how it will compare to sonys tlofu bundle

2 things:

1) is this temporary or permanent?

2) either way the fact that they did this just 12 days after putting the price back up, makes me think they got some very bad sales in the last week...

also i HOPE this means Sony will give the PS4 a price cut as soon as possible.

I think they intended to reduce the price all along, however there was a healthy discussion in the boardroom and back offices of Microsoft and the Xbox group about how much. I think the Xbox team argued for keeping it at $350, but corporate management wanted something higher. Possibly $379.00.

Historically if you look at Microsoft price cuts, they come in smaller chunks than $50. Typically they start out with a $20 or $30 price cut. The Xbox team likely wanted to keep the momentum of the sales up through January, and argued for $350, while corporate management was looking at the best price point for profitability and sales.

I doubt this was something they just decided upon yesterday while standing around the water cooler complaining about low sales. I think corporate management is reluctant to do anything that could severely impact profitability, while the Xbox team realizes there are profits to be made through game and services sales. So, a long conversation took place over the holiday with it culminating in a decision sometime after January 3rd, looking at the performance of the Xbox One at the price point offered, and determining, based on previous sales and current sales, which price point offered the best bang for the buck and likely going with the Xbox teams gut feel.

Anyone who has worked in a corporate office environment will understand. Sometimes, simple decisions take a long time because of corporate politics and bureaucracy. It took 3 months for the IT department I worked on to apply a service pack to two different products because some members of management wanted to ensure that our problems would be fixed by installing them. So, we underwent three months of pain, for our help desk team, our technical support team, our retail employees, and consumers, as well as engaging vender consultants on-site to identify and trouble-shoot the cause of our issues only to come to the conclusion that we needed to install those two service packs. There were some hot fixes involved too, but the vast majority of our pain would have been resolved by those two service packs, which I advocated for on the first day and which we were planning to do at that time anyway.

Not only were we frozen for three months from resolving the problem, but our original plans to implement the one of the service packs by my team was put on hold until the vendor consultants determined the problem.

Corporate politics and bureaucracy suck. Especially when it's necessary to have timely decisions made.

Or they don't sell as many consoles as they will now and make less money and lose marketshare. 1 is a better situation.

Here in Ireland they have a ton of xbox ads just like sony do for ps4. But the Irish are choosing the ps4  big time overall. 

Why are you labeling me "a poor soul" I got the White Xbox One for $399 and I have never regretted it not even once and I have a feeling more people feel this way.

You got it after it jumped up to 399 and now goes back to 349? During the 8 days it was 399? 

You know all the people that are pissed at this? Because I don't see any kind of backlash about this and don't forget the price cut before  the holidays that I got  my Xbox One, this doesn't seem like a problem for me.

Thanks for avoiding the question.

Later

I'm a bit baffled by this move. Why did they not just make this offer a permanent extension to the holiday price? Why raise the price again for 8 days, confuse retailers and consumers, then drop the price again. If the aim was to keep customers buying in large numbers to take advantage of what was advertised as a short and limited sale period, why not on the very last day just release a statement along the lines of "Due to the incredible reaction from consumers to the new Xbox One price point, we have decided to continue to offer the console at this price point for NA consumers...etc". No strange price swings, and no annoyed customers to deal with.

Was this call really made in one week? Or is lowering, then hiking, then lowering again a vaild strategy?

This move also confirms what we knew already, MS are lazer focused on their home market and this is definitely the best move for them.

Also, to those insinuating that money is no concern to MS, this cut should and would have been the same worldwide if that were the case. They particularly need to try and generate some momentum in Europe.