When the 360 came out didn't Ps2 still outsell it for a while in NA? My theory is that Ps2 owners and gamers in general were waiting for a PS3 like they were for a Ps2 when Dreamcast came out but because of the high price lack of games and general shitty job on Sonys part they went to Wii or the 360. I don't think the Xbox really did that much to get in the way at PS3 start since Sony really screwed themselves over.

Well Microsoft's Xbox 360 is a success. They had the financial support to back them up. Ms was simply is better than Sega then.

It was more to do with Sony's mistakes with the PS3 then what MS did right with the 360.

Microsoft nailed the spec point also, to have a competitive system. If it had gone with only 256MB of total memory, there would of been BIG problems. But its memory matched what the PS3 had, and the graphics are in the same class also. One can thank Epic for having Microsoft go with 512MB of RAM instead of 256. Also, Microsoft has had deeper pockets to, and BluRay didn't catch on the way DVD did last generation. The PS2 was a cheap DVD player when it was released, which led to large-scale adoption in Japan.

Well what the hell are the odds of that? a business (only here to make money) taking stabs at another business that is in direct competition of it! Wow i've never heard of that before!

What is this world coming to when business's are only in the market to make money *shakes head*

Its becuase M$ didnt continue to sell the origional xbox and had the money to buy new studios and encourage 3rd party support. Te fact that M$ has lots of money is the single biggest factor. SEGA ran out of money with the dreamcast and because of the terrible 3rd party support couldt recoup their money especially because they had been in decline for 2 generations.

microsoft have money to burn, that it's.

sega didn't actually they had 2 failed systems before it.

microsoft used the same tactic they used to beat nestscape in the browser.
release a product way before earlier with tons of features and bugged, but then you see what happen IE 6 is a mummy that doesn't die, and it's preventing the internet market to progress because lack of standard HTML implementation also their OS monopoly gave them a advance since they could bundle it with windows making it worse to progress since people still use it since it came with the PC even with better alternites like firefox, chrome or safari.
as developer have been a huge problem, time that can be spend to make a better internet experience it's waste trying to make websites perform correctly on IE 6-8.
360 jave the same problem on the form on the RROD, but hardware it's not something u can't patch unless you replace all userbase with a actually fixed version.

well now they a bleeding marketshare to firefox , chrome , opera and safari i hope it happens fast so it can progress again.

sony pretty much bit itself over, if they released a 299$ machine it would be ps2 era all over again. its easy to pass a invalid when already fallen over by itself.

I see 6 key reasons...

-Microsoft took advantage of Sony's stunning blunders (Sony seemed to be begging its competition to take market share from it with its price points and losing major 3rd party exclusives like GTA4).

-The 360 got an amazing amount of third-party support out of the gate unlike the Dreamcast. EA for example blamed the Dreamcast's choice of using an "unusual, non- industry standard, not well-supported chip" as one of their main reasons for not supporting the system.

-The Dreamcast didn't have major games on the scale of Halo 3, Gears of War, etc, to attract gamers to its console in the West. Most of it's games were relatively Japanese centric which didn't resonate as well with the much larger American market.

-The 360 had the advantage of an already well established online service to attract even more console gamers to the system.

-Sega was on financially shaky ground while Microsoft had enough money to secure exclusive content and to heavily promote its console and games.

-Sega had lost of trust with some gamers and was seen as going downhill at the time the Dreamcast was released. Even though Microsoft had stopped short the Xbox's lifespan it didn't seem to resonate like the series of failed hardware that Sega had put out.