Yes you are, obviously a tactician with no equal.

Microsoft has not defeated Sony yet. The corporate war is only just started and will rage on for years and years. Microsoft need to force Sony out of the console business. Sony and Microsoft will lose lots of money to try and go for each others throats. Who has the more financial resources will eventually win out in the end,

Sony won the battle by winning last generation with PS2 which beat XBox comprehensively. But the corporate war is far from over between Sony and Microsoft.

I concur

Wait, not so fast Darth

THIS = /thread

Microsoft sold the last xbox at a loss, too. That didn't help them last gen.

Sony pretty well defeated themselves, and Nintendo put the stake in them. If there were no X-box 360 this generation, things would still look about exactly the same as they do for Sony. They'd be lagging in sales versus the PS2, and getting thwomped by the Wii.

Really, Microsoft has done absolutely zip this generation to take Sony out of it's first place spot.

Waiting for someone to make a thread (How Nintendo defeated Sony and Microsoft).

True. But MS has done absolutely everything this generation to take sony out of it's 2nd place spot.

You can make it, you came up with the idea.

Microsoft is doing well this gen because they've done just about everything right.  The only negative of the 360 really is the RRoD (which is a big thing for a lot of people) but now they've even taken care of that.

Whether they were specifically targeting Sony or not, they deserve their 2nd place this gen.

There's no such thing as "deserving" in the market. You don't gain karma points by making good games and giving good services. You sell what you sell, by using whatever means you choose to employ. A self-fulfilling prophecy if you want.

In this sense each and every item on the market "deserves" its sales in a tautological way, or none does in the truest sense of the word.

MS lost money by entering the console market and willingly did so, because they wanted to gain a slice of the upcoming media delivery and service market. The same trend shift that is threatening and will reduce their importance in the OS and application market gave them reason to do so.

They are succeeding in their goal: their greatest victory is the penetration of Live and the Netflix kind of deal. If they will have to go all casual next gen to keep striving towards their real goal, they will.

PS: do you have any evidence that the latest 360 hardware iteration have fallen inline with the average failure rates for similar electronic products (less than 1%)?