Success comes in many forms.
1. MS have the resources right now to be very successful in the market as it is today. How? (i) ditch the custom hardware (ii) go multiplat with everything. That is to say do what sega did, drop custom hardware make content deals with anyone who has cash (iii) keep GP on PC and produce some off the shelf branded gaming PCs for around the custom hardware price tag, and target those specs with your titles.
2. But MS seems to want to own the “next” market - subs and streaming - and they’ll try and use today’s market as the foundation by filtering out current competitors here. To succeed with that… Well MS is a boring and uncool brand - they just aren’t a multimedia company, they’re a stuffy cubicle drone company and every time I see their branding in entertainment products I think of a workplace. Not good - I want a brand I associate with fun, relaxation, innovation. Not spreadsheets, memos and BSODs.
So first dissociate gaming from MS as a brand and second, Xbox as a brand is also pretty lame now, go for a rebranding of that coupled with management and structural change.
The problem with this is it sets MS gaming back again and they don’t have time to monopolise the market as they desire if they do that. This should all have been done before the Xsex launch.
3. Well this was supposed to be just keep doing what they’re doing but that isn’t really getting them where they want go in timescales they’re happy with. So they’re trying to accelerate by buying major chunks of the market but that’s not working either. Ultimately the way to do well is to work hard, work smart and grow incrementally but MS seems unprepared to do that now and probably realises that if they do that, they’ll go into the “next gen” gaming sector still not market leader.
So if MS is going to keep iterating with Phil and their uncool branding, they should focus more on Nintendo market share with cheap hardware and products for the “family” end of the market. They seem to have a knack for getting smaller boutique games out - Pentiment and HiFi recently but even back in the 360 hey days the most interesting titles were the esoteric “fillers” - don’t need powerful rigs for those and they can be produced on GP subs money in reasonable timeframes. Those are the kinds of things I’d play on a switch, mobile device or something like that - not on a game console or PC.
Tldr the way to the top for MS is to stop being MS