Great for them. A nice milestone to hit. Did it faster than the first XBox, if I recall which is growth. Also great for them.
But, they had a year head start on the competition. The Wii, which came out a year later is within a nose of of also hitting that goal in the US and has been cleaning the 360's clock in unit sales every month just about. The PS3 has recovered from its own issues and also being a fierce competitor.
Then there's the whole issue of the world being a big, big, big place. On a global basis, they're five million units BEHIND the Wii, despite coming out a year earlier. PS3 is also gaining strength elsewhere. But that's spin and I get it. Then, however, they jump to this crazy statement:
This one made me howl with laughter and smacked of "Nintendo's been kicking our ass every month and Sony has been coming out of nowhere and we're terrified of what the competition is going to do".
I have no doubt that any of the consoles could win this war at this stage. This is not like the previous two generations but more akin to the SNES-Genesis battles of the early 1990s with fierce competitors going at it - only this time there are three of them fighting it out.
- Microsoft, who has a huge war chest, a whole back end experience and a determination to win, no matter what the cost.
- Sony, the previous leader of two generations, an enormous brand equity and a built in Blu-Ray player; and
- Nintendo, the company who took their primary strength of fun games and applied it to a killer blue-ocean strategy while being written off by their competitors.
All three have been investigated for illegal monopolistic practices and all three know how to play hard ball.
Which makes such a statement seem all the more weak and silly coming from Microsoft who KNOWS how to compete.
At least the games argument didn't smack of desperation, though there is obviously some spin there too.
Cmon Microsoft ... you can do better than this!
They have a history of using out of context and outright incorrect statements in press releases so that major news outlets who fail to do any sort of fact checking carry their bogus stories which they hope will be accepted as fact by consumers and shareholders alike.
Microsoft famously put out documents touting the technical specifications of the original Xbox ahead of the other two platforms of the time, the Game Cube and PS2. Microsoft just guessed what the Game Cube's clock speed was and listed it as about 95 MHZ slower than it actually was. They later admitted it was a mistake.
They then were listing refurbished systems and store kiosks as part of their "shipped" numbers in various releases. Meaning these were systems that were sold twice in the case of refurbs, or systems that weren't actually sold in the case of store kiosks. Again, it's VERY convenient that these mistakes are always ones to make their numbers look better.