I saw my first Microsoft store a month ago. It looked exactly like the Apple Store I just came out of - except the tables had a different shade, and there was nothing comparable to the XBox360+Kinect station in the Apple store.
They've been copying "things that work" for so long, and up until a few years ago, it just worked. And now that it doesn't, it seems that they have no idea what to do.
You actually bring up the one exception that I failed to mention. The XBox was a pretty idea by Microsoft and it's implementation was fantastic (it's revenues a drop in the bucket compared to other departments but still). Kinect, while a blatant response to the Nintendo Wii's accelerometers has opened up some very interesting possibilities that were previously only limited to academic level research...
In that regard I think that the XBox team is probably the only well-ran unit in the firm.
The first XBox was basically a PC with an exact spec. The 360 was plagued by RRODs. I know 5 people who own XBox 360, and every single one of them was either on the 2nd or 3rd console due to malfunction.
The Kinect was not developed at Microsoft - the camera and original skeletal modeling is from PrimeSense (although later MS took over the software part, at least). It was a marketing response to the Wii, true - but it's a third party product they bought.
"Only limited to academic level research"? I had a chance to play with the commercial ZCam almost two years before the Kinect came out; And ZCam wasn't the first product.
> In that regard I think that the XBox team is probably the only well-ran unit in the firm.
Have they turned a profit yet? I suppose they have by now, but they went through at least 4BN in funding before they did (if they have indeed). It might be well-run, but without real evidence I can't assume that.
They've been copying "things that work" for so long, and up until a few years ago, it just worked. And now that it doesn't, it seems that they have no idea what to do.