The attitude of, if you want to play games offline buy a xbox 360 and the contempt and arrogance of Microsoft in their attitude towards gamers, making the assumption that all the xbox 360 owners would just jump ship, was staggering.
I think that's a massive exaggeration and more to do with incompetence.
They tried to do something to move console gaming forward and screwed up the messaging. Firstly too much emphasis on the TV/Media side of XO at the initial reveal. If they had have just done games so opinion was XO and PS4 were pretty much on a par for gaming (which they are) and then have done a follow up with "and look at all this single under TV media box/TV/Sports (I still hope they do something with the Premier League/FIFA and Formula one similar to the NFL stuff) stuff along with Windows 8 apps, snap, instant switching, Skype etc" it would have gone across a lot better with hardcore gamers.
They made a pigs ear of the messaging around second hand sales (to the point there are still people who think you couldn't sell games on despite it being very clearly, albeit belatedly, said you could).
They also missed the boat completely on the library sharing. Frankly i don't know many people that don't have an internet connection for their console and the ability to share my entire games library of full games with 10 friends (and have them share with me) was for a me an stunningly good thing. Unfortunately it got drowned out by wails of "DRM DRM DRM". I can see why they needed you to have an internet check once a day to stop the system being abused, I just wish that instead of trashing it they said if you don't check in once a day you can still play games, just not shared ones and only with a disc in the drive, not disc-less from the HDD.
In any case, we are where we are and I think MS have quite obviously shown contrition and listened to their customers since. Some will want to portray it as "we pwned M$, they had no choice", I think they genuinely listened and although in a minority I actually wish they had have stayed with their initial vision and taken the hit as i found it really quite interesting, it was the only console to genuinely try to move consoles forward form "more of the same but with better graphics".
I can only hope a vast array of MS PR and Marketing people were sacked for a **** up of epic proportions.
