Even tough I'm pretty confident that Microsoft 180'd only because Sony is crushing them right now, and not because of a renewed sense of customer-centric marketing, I'm planning on picking up an XB1 later this year. We punished Microsoft for what they did wrong with the XB1, I think they should be rewarded for trying to make things right.
Oh how our standards have fallen. Sorry for the long rant, and this isn't aimed directly at you, but my goodness. Will the defense of Microsoft ever end?
Plenty of consoles were "punished" in the financial/business sense for doing stuff that wasn't a quarter as evil or anti-consumer as what Microsoft attempted (and is still doing), and they were punished so bad that the console makers were jettisoned from the console market. Saturn and Dreamcast were both aimed at being primo arcade-in-your-home machines not to mention some cool do-dads like high-quality sprite capability (Saturn) and online/VMU (DC) and were punished because the market was moving in a different direction. N64 and Gamecube were punished because Nintendo lost favor with 3rd parties and also tried to focus on gaming instead of multimedia features.
Vita was/is punished for being a $250 (now $200) multimedia handheld in the age of smartphones, with expensive memsticks. Neo Geo tried to be an arcade-perfect home console and was punished because it priced itself out of the market. Systems like Neo Geo Color and Game Gear attempted full color games (with more richness, too) long before Nintendo gave it a shot, and they failed because they lacked in accessibily, affordability, and batter life.. Atari Jaguar was Atari's final attempt at getting back into the market and was actually a pretty cool box, but things were too crowded back then so it failed.. 3D0 was an attempt to de-centralize console hardware and was also one of the first attempts to bridge between PC and console.
What was noble about Microsoft's attempt? What redeeming aspects of the Xbox One deserve a free pass? Compared to the above consoles that were punished with failure just because they misread the market or went too powerful or were too expensive, why does Microsoft's PR statements and behavior deserve to be forgotten, especially when many of the Execs are still in key positions at Microsoft? The only reason why Microsoft is not going to fail whereas the above consoles did is because Microsoft has enough money to throw at it to keep it alive...and people such as yourself who think Microsoft is all hunky-dorey simply because they changed policies that should've have been there at all.
What Microsoft was attempting is exactly what they attempt in every other industry: muscle their way in with money and try to wrest control away from everyone else by any means possible. For one of the few instances in Microsoft's history, they failed that attempt. Now we should just move on and let them try again? Cute.
