Mibu no ookami
Demoted Member® Pro™
Microsoft is a big company. They're not financially on the ropes like Sega in 2001, or Atari and 3DO in 1996. They can tough it out for a good while longer.
If they want to bow out of the hardware biz, then that is totally their choice. Nobody's twisting their arm.
At the same time, if they want to remain a hardware manufacturer, then they need to compete on a higher level. If their market share continues to dwindle, and they fail to bring compelling products to market, then for all intents and purposes they might as well not be there at all.
Microsoft is about to be the largest company in the world due to Apple's antitrust issues.
That doesn't mean they haven't abandoned product lines before. Just because they're a massive company doesn't mean they'll keep throwing away good money after bad.
Look at the next 2 years, do you see any increase in market share on the horizon for Microsoft? It's straight decline for the next 2 years.
What does that mean for the next 5-10 years? It means people locked in on PlayStation. The greatest determinator of whether someone would buy the PS6 or the NextBox would be whether they buy a PS5 or not.
They made a big bet on GamePass and Day 1 PC that is certainly not paying off. They're going to have to adjust their market strategy to the reality that GamePass isn't growing and that Xbox is dying as a platform.