Nintendo made 1.5 billion in profit LAST ( financial ) year. This ( financial ) year Nintendo will blow out all precedent record.

PS : Wii was/is a wise move  

Yes!  And I'm betting that a number of people with real influence at Microsoft aren't happy with it either.  They won't say so in public because they don't want their stock values to drop.

My (probably wrong) conspiracy theory is that if the Xbox division doesn't turn some kind of profit in the next couple of years, the "720" will be canned.

Which series did MS introduce?  Halo, for example, was anticipated long before MS announced it would make an Xbox.  Moving to hard drives and online play were inevitabilities -- crossovers from the PC gaming arena.  People liked online play, and companies liked the idea of being able to someday deliver content (including games) to consoles.  The latter is really the main reason for hard drives. 

That's similar to suggesting that MS brought us HD graphics across the board.  Well, not really -- HD graphics were an inevitability.  MS was just the first to the market.

As an MS stockholder, I wish they would just dump the entertainment division (or make it s/w only) and focus on pc's. Aside from o/s' and office, everything that MS tries to do is just a rip off of someone else's innovation. First it was the xbox (PS2) then MSN (yahoo and google) then the zune (Ipod). Stop putting money towards making inroads in existing markets and try to make new ones. They're just throwing away MY money.

It is a very bold statement to say that the Xbox 360 is going to turn green anytime soon.
MS continues to sink money into the xbox project, because they can afford to do so, they look into the console gaming industry as an investment into their diversification plan.

I suppose there will be some rabble rousing by the investors if the losses continue to mount. I know this sounds clinched but, Typically Microsoft projects have taken up to version 3 to really rake in the moolah. So i could expect xbox 3 to help microsoft break even, if not make some profit for them.

 for the division as a whole or simply the next xbox....because id have to say that there is NO WAY this division of MSFT ever breaks even or turns profit as a whole.

As for the OP, earnings season is coming again. I doubt that the 360 is profitable yet, but we will see if MS is at least doing better. Sony and Nintendo's results should be around next month as well. As far as my own predictions, I would think that Sony would be doing slightly better financially than this last quarter. Microsoft will probably be doing just as bad, b/c falcon hasn't even came out yet.

The questions are:
1. Has the XBox line been profitable?
A. Other then a single quarter, no.

2. Will it ever be profitable?
A. Possabily.

3. Does it matter?
A. Yes, every company wants their product to be profitable eventually.

4. If it doesn't turn a profit, will that mean the end of XBox?
A. No.

I believe that MS is looking at the future of computers and see the computer becomeing replaced by the media center with computer capabilities. You should start to see this happening in 3 to 5 years.

Right now MS has the computer OS market cornered, and this is where they make the majority of their money. What would happen if everyone switch from a computer to media centers? MS would loss all that potential money in OS sales. So the xbox is designed to become the defacto media center and thus the MS OS the defacto OS for media centers.

How many computers are there in the world right now? Would 1 billion be to high a count? What if 100 million people switch from computers to a media center? At aprox $300 an OS for each media center sold that would be $30 billion in revenue vs $7 billion spent on the xbox line.

If it wasn't for the xbox line, MS would just be ceadding those revenues to whoever becomes the leader in media center hardware (more then likely Sony) at the cost of there own computer OS sales. Once a leader has been decieded in the media center race, it will be almost impossible to dethrone the leader. (As MS has shown by becomeing the leader in PC OS sales)

That is the main reason MS entered the console race and the main reason it will stay in the race untill the very end.

BigFatJ - They implimented them first(or best, compared to dreamcast), I give them credit. Sure, Halo would have been a Mac Exclusive, but then the source of more Mockery than Colin Mocharie. Ooo, Master Chief! Why isn't his armour all white and overpriced like the system etc etc.

I really gotta wonder just what the projections were. I don't see the vast majority of users having video game consoles as media hubs, seeing as they are percieved as Video game Consoles and not media hubs. It's an interesting gamble, seeing as computers got big not from Media, but from work. Seeing as I currently require a computer to do all my work, so much so that my employer had a new one purchased for a new Hire (Me) instantly without any fuss, I don't think I'll be doing my accounting on a playstation 4 anytime soon.

 I am a new member on the site.   I have been visiting here for several months and really enjoy the site as a whole.  The reason for the question was simply out of curiousity.  I do only have a Wii and a DS and I am a Nintendo Fanboy I guess you could say, but I do not think the PS3 and 360 are crap or anything like that.  They are both good systems, I just prefer Nintendo that is all.  I guess I wanted to go ahead and get that out of the way.