Xbox 360, Bundles, and Delayed Releases.

[Merusk]

Japan Analysts Cold Shoulder Xbox 360
Shinko Securities analyst Yuichi Kobayashi said, "Given declining enthusiasm for the Xbox 360 by Japanese players and software makers, it would be almost impossible for Microsoft to overtake Sony or even Nintendo.

Emphasis mine.  And, ouch.  8)

Alkiera

He meant in Japan.  The original X-box was far, far behind the Cube in Japanese sales, if I recall correctly.

[Margalis]

In any given week in Japan the sales of the XBox for the past year or so have been on the order of tens to the low hundreds. They probably sold a couple thousand Xboxes in Japan ALL of last year.

One big problem is the major games are games the Japanese don't care about. Call of Duty? Perfect Dark? Madden?

[Strazos]

The 2 big "next-gen" consoles are realy over-rated in terms of horsepower anyway.

[Margalis]

Yes, they are. As I've pointed out, to support HD you need a 4x increase in performance to break even. Then there is the issue that in HD if you have the same number of polys on screen it will be more noticeable, so you really need to increase the number of polys you can display as well, just to break even. So you need 4x the fill rate, 4x texture memory (for higher res textures), 4x the number of polygons, etc, just to take advantage of HD support. (Which means, if you are not running in HD, your are using 1/4th of the power you theoretically have.

Now of course 4x the number of polys in HD is still 4x on a normal TV, but much less noticeable.

Every new system over-promises, with the exception on Nintendo, they typically are at least more honest, at least with the GC and Rev. (The N64/Ultra64 was pretty guilty of overselling)