I don't think, reasonably speaking, the can. There are things they could do, but from a business perspective I would guess the amount of money they would lose on the overall market wouldn't be worth what it would take to secure my specific sale. Though, for the sake of debate:
The Kinect has to go. I understand what they're trying to do. I understand that, at this point, they are trying to sell the X-Box One primarily on the "experience" they offer, and with their E3 snafu having badly tarnished the brand value of X-Box Live, that essentially comes down to Kinect as the pivotal difference from the PS4. I'm not even saying this won't work as a marketing strategy in terms of making inroads with many "family" gamers and people who want a media center.
I am saying that I have no personal interest in the Kinect, and forcing me to buy one puts a bad taste in my mouth. This is seriously compounded by (and compounds) the second problem...
They need to subsidize my purchase. I haven't seen exact numbers, but from what I've been told PS4 is selling at a loss while X-Box One is breaking even or possibly turning a profit. This is absurd to me; gaming is in an economic situation where even Nintendo, the most frugal console manufacturer in the business, is not comfortable trying to sell their machine at a profit. I can't even begin to imagine what makes Microsoft think they can enter the market not only at a hundred dollars more expensive, but with less actual value in components in that marked-up box on top of it.
As noted, this causes an especially bad reaction with two realizations: one, that part of that money is going to pay for a Kinect that I don't even want; and two, that the Box itself is borderline useless without an X-Box Live Gold subscription.
The Kinect is something they should be subsidizing. I think it's an interesting piece of technology, and they have every right to be proud of it. They are more than welcome to give it a push to become a ubiquitous part of their gaming experience if they genuinely feel that they can deliver an improved experience off the back of it. The fact that they aren't willing to take a loss on sales to make the pack-in happen says to me that they actually don't have a particularly great amount of confidence in that scenario, however, and if they aren't confident enough to that the Kinect will revolutionize living room gaming to pay out of pocket for it, why do they think I should be?
The fact Gold may as well be de facto (and seemingly would have been, had they gotten their way as originally planned) to the purchase makes it even more perplexing. I can get quite a bit of technology for cheap in a phone contract because the overpriced contract itself subsidizes the cost of the phone. This is essentially what Microsoft is doing with the X-Box One and Gold, and yet they expect me to pay them more than the manufacturing cost up front on top of the subscription fee? No, sorry, that doesn't jive.
Drop the Kinect, then drop the price of the console by not only the cost of Kinect but an additional $60 (that you know you're going to make back off my Gold subscription anyway), and we'd be at parity and able to have a reasonable conversation about whether the PS4 or X-Box One is a better buy. Then they'd just have to fix...
X-Box Live Gold needs to be a better value. The main thing driving the adoption of Live was, essentially, peer pressure. The other systems lacked mature online infrastructure, and if you wanted to play online with your friends - who had Live - then you had to play on Live as well. This - not the exclusives, not the specs, not the price - is the reason I bought a 360 and most of my multiplayer games were purchased for the 360 if they were multiplatform.
I do feel like X-Box Live remains the more mature and robust infrastructure, but whatever "good buzz" they had surrounding it pretty much went the way of the dodo at E3. No matter how diligent they've been in reversing those policies, the view of the consumer is now that Live is an inherently greedy, self-serving "service" poised to turn on them like a viper the moment they let their guard down. Live went from being my de facto network for playing console games online to being a nuisance I would merely have to tolerate if I wanted to use an X-Box, literally overnight.
The first thing they need to do is open Live to cross-platform play. The decision to make it a closed service made sense in the 360 era because, as I noted above, the "peer pressure" of needing to be on Live to play with friends sold the system and the service. The problem is that strategy relies on critical mass: if there are more users on rival networks (which at this point it seems certain there will be), there's no longer an impetus for people to use your closed infrastructure, especially if the rival services are permitting cross-platform play (and increasingly, they are). A closed network, rather than driving sales, actively begins to repel them.
The second thing they need to do is offer more "bang for the buck". They need to have more - and better - digital sales. They need more - and better - free content. They need to do something to show me that X-Box Live Gold is a valuable service that I should willfully pay for, rather than a hidden fee associated with my console that I begrudgingly pay. The examples are easy to find: Steam and PSN both do a monumentally better job of making people feel like they provide a useful, valuable service at a nominal fee rather than simply leeching money for what should be default features.
They need a better library of games or backwards compatibility. This is true of the PS4 as well. I have a huge library of games for both my PS3 and 360, many of them un- or partially-played due to professional obligations, and many of them so spectacular that I'd be hard-pressed to find anything in the launch line-ups of either system I'd find more interested in than playing them again. At the moment, even if you handed me an X-Box One for free, I'm not sure I could be arsed to hook it up.
I'm given to understand both companies are trying to find solutions to this problem, and I understand the technical hurdles involved. I hardly expect them to go back and spend a wad of extra money putting hardware-based backwards compatibility into these systems. I'm just being honest: right now the launch libraries of these new systems are actively competing with not just one another, but the total libraries of their previous iterations, at least in terms of "stuff I can have hooked up to my TV", and neither one is looking particularly impressive by that metric.
That would get them to where I was comparing the two systems purely on their exclusive games and technical specs. That would probably still be an unfavorable comparison for the X-Box One, but at least as a consumer I could try to make a direct comparison rather than feeling like the X-Bone is completely unworthy of consideration. And yes, as noted at the outset, I realize my demands are probably unreasonable from a business perspective; this is mostly just a thought experiment for me.
