Well like someone just said, much of the Wii/DS audience didn't come from people who wanted to play traditional Nintendo games, u can see that by the fact that games like 3D Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Metroid, Fire Emblem, Advance/Battalion Wars, Paper Mario, among others showed little or no growth.

Much of these devices audience consisted of people buying it for the new concepts in hardware like motion/touch controls and software like Wii Sports/Wii Fit/Brain Age/Nintendogs with only few traditional Nintendo games like 2D Mario & Mario Kart benefiting from the larger audience.

because the Xbox One still has Xbox in its name, since Nintendo has always a different name they are more likely to fail naming their console. Sony did it right from the start to keep calling it the PlayStation, you cant go wrong with that

The name didn't ruin the Wii U. The Wii U ruined itself.

I never liked how nintendo or MS named their consoles. It's confusing to the majority of casuals and people buying gifts unless there's a lot of marketing to basically explain the product to 'em. Both apple's i products and sony's playstation consoles follow in a numerical order that ANYONE can understand. It's just more logical and easier to market to consumers.

Edit. In response to the title though, MS marketed the xbox one better than nintendo with the wii u. Both names were horrible choices.

Absolutely, I've always maintained that vast majority of the Wii's installed base were so called casuals and the 8th gen seems to support this notion. I still find it interesting that Nintendo's 1st party efforts are not halting the, by now famous, curve of decline in home console hardware sales. It's as if this will happen regardless of the quality of the core software available; which also leads me to believe that franchise fatigue could be a factor as well, if the impact of the franchises had not lessened with time, surely they would have helped maintain healthier hardware sales numbers.
There are several reasons as to why this decline is happening, I've talked about it at length in the thread that shall not be named, but I honestly think that Nintendo's main franchises are losing more and more relevance as hardware movers, the lack of enthusiasm even in the year when Mario Kart and Smash released would suggest as much, even with the slew of problems with the Wii U and its design.

'Cause Microsoft made it quite clear that the Xbox One is a new console, meanwhile Nintendo didn't.

This makes a lot of sense. Wonder why I didn't see it this way before.

People play up the name thing too much. That was only one problem, and a small one compared to the others. Wii 2 wouldn't have sold much better.

I'm not sure if I believe Nintendo is really losing appeal, here's something I find interesting.

NES-61 million, Game & Watch-43 million

SNES-49 million, Gameboy (Apr 89-Mar 96)-54 million

N64-33 million, Gameboy (Apr 96-Mar 03)-64 million

GC-22 million, Gameboy Advance-81 million

Each of these generations added up to about 100 million and about 500 million in software, with a rather consistent breakdown per region as well, Americas-50 million, Japan-25 million, Others-25 million give or take a few million. Wii U+3DS in Japan+Others are on track to meet the previous generations baseline, it is literally only Americas that is tracking behind, probably around 30 million lifetime. I think price could be a big factor in this as American kids has historically been on of, if not the biggest demographic for Nintendo. Here are the prices of Nintendo hardware in the middle of each generation.

1988, NES-$99.99, Game & Watch-$19.99

1993, SNES-$129.99, Gameboy-$89.99

1998, N64-$129.99, Gameboy Color-$69.99

2003, GC-$99.99, Gameboy Advance SP-$99.99

Adjusted for inflation, each generation u could get both the handheld & console for about $300 give or take. For comparison, Wii U-$299.99, New 3DS XL-$199.99, it costs about $500 to get both this generation.

So America's is looking to be down about 40% (30m vs 50m) and costs about 40% more ($300 vs $500), maybe it's a coincidence or maybe price has a huge effect on this generations sales in the Americas.

Thread shouldv'e ended 10 pages ago. How many ways can shitty marketing be explained? It's common knowledge that a majority of consumers didn't know about the Wii U release, while XB1 and PS4 had release parties covered by all the major gaming networks live and such. So even those who don't follow gaming would've heard about it and seen it trending in social media.

Hell, XB1 was kept under water for christs sake, they made spectacles of it.

The blame falls wholly on Nintendo for failing to promote their new console effectively. If Consumer's don't know about the product that constitues a real emergency. By Launch Day, Nintendo was already too late, the die had been cast. 

Even with PS3 and XB1 that had pretty bad launches, people still knew about their releases. 

Name means nothing, it's how people hear it.