Comment by astrospective

I agree that the XBox senior leadership has made a series of critical strategic mistakes going back over a decade which have nerfed the otherwise generally quite good hardware, software, game and online service execution. Just with XBox One the long string of gaffes and fatal errors was... impressive.

* Going all-in on bundling the Kinect, a very costly depth camera interface peripheral, with every XBox.

* Committing to making XBox an "all-in-one entertainment system" by building in an expensive HDMI input capability to enable being an electronic program guide, digital video recorder, Blu-ray disc player, streaming TV service and music service. The Kinect camera peripheral also had a built-in IR blaster to control all your other living room devices.

* Announcing pervasive DRM that would tie game discs to the user's account, prevent reselling or lending game discs.

* Aggressively pre-announcing no backward compatibility with previous XBox games. A senior XBox exec apparently told the media (on the record), "If you're backwards compatible, you're backward."

While the last two mistakes were walked back before the console even shipped, building in & bundling costly hardware couldn't be walked back. Nor could the significant investment in developing operating system and application software to support electronic program guide, IR control, video streaming and recording. These large hardware and software investments certainly came at the cost of investing as much in hardware and software to better render games, play games and support game development. You can kind of understand why MSFT thought each of these things would be good for MSFT strategically, but they were all tone deaf in terms of what their market wanted and fatal distractions from the main business of being a good game console.

I hope someday a definitive case study will be written giving insight into how otherwise smart, experienced executives can make so many catastrophic strategic errors over such a long period of time.