Well Microsoft got XBOX wrong two times in a row. So no surprises here. Only the first XBOX was good console IMO. XBone and 360 were disappointments [1].
Surface is also one of the products Microsoft almost got right - there was real interest on windows on ARM at the time. But full windows.
And Bing - well its only advantage over google is the turned off content filter.
> [1] Owned 360 for 5 years, played 5 hours on it.
so because YOU only played 5 hours on YOUR 360, the console was a failure?
Let me counter your anecdote with one of my own: The XBOX was a disappointment and the 360 was a good console. Reason: I played much more on my 360 than the original.
The 360 was around for a much longer time than the original and there were many more games made for the 360 than for the original.
If you don't believe that to be enough, there were 24M original xboxes sold, compared to 80M xbox 360.
The run of X360 was almost twice of the Xbox. Correct for that. Also PS2 shipped 150 million units by which metric the whole 7th gen was disappointment because PS3 and X360 managed to ship slightly more combined.
But yes - 360 was a failure. We got stratification of the published, ballooning budgets, total homogenization of the games. Every abusive trick ever from publishers on the consoles, red ring of death, needlessly complicated online survives (the whole MS points crap), XBOX live gold subscriptions and the console barely broke even at best from every report I have ever read. The decision for the HDD to be optional was "brilliant". The first few revisions of the hardware were poorly made. Instead of the ugly but perfectly cool able and boring xbox we got something elegant, pretty, noisy and overheating.
Surface is also one of the products Microsoft almost got right - there was real interest on windows on ARM at the time. But full windows.
And Bing - well its only advantage over google is the turned off content filter.
[1] Owned 360 for 5 years, played 5 hours on it.