How oddly true I didn't recognize this until now. Very little mention of Microsoft on the device itself. XBOX is very much a brand on its own. How is XBOX as a brand useful to MS is your question: hmm. Seems like with XBO they wanted to move into content management or something but even though the original idea failed they can pivot Xbox One and still meet their intended goals. What that goal is, is beyond me.
If the sales figures are to be believed, digital sales from the online stores on home consoles still pale in comparison to physical sales so you may be over-crediting the digital stores significance in making money and selling hardware.
Why? It's awful. And I speak as somebody who choses to compute on OS X but somewhat feel locked into iOS because of past significant purchases. iOS serves me well but the App Store is not a good experience as a user.
No, my question was "But how do you monetise branding exactly?". Business is about contributions to bottom lines.
T-shirts!
Yes. Microsoft are deciding whether to change the canteen's Hotdog Monday to Hamburger Monday.
That's not a difficult decision, hamburger is real meat, while american hotdogs are made of carcass slimy paste with starch, salt and MSG.
Bratwurst spaghetti sauce is also yummy with the right type of wurst!
Looking from the outside in , it makes little sense . Sure they can buy AMD and prevent Sony from going to them next gen and saving a little money on chips for the xbox one but currently AMD has nothing that can match cherry trail and the core line for the surface or anything for windows phone and certainly not hololens .
The worlds biggest software company who happen to have a monopoly in desktop operating systems owning a microprocessor and GPU company would open all sorts of anti-trust issues. This would be very bad for Nvidia and potentially even Intel.
