The XBox also had the luxury of amazing timing, although it's unclear whether it was intentional or luck.

Sony dominated generations 5 and 6 against weak competition. The Dreamcast was an outright failure that was discontinued a few months before the Xbox's release, and the Gamecube was a commercial disappointment; which practically handed Microsoft a #2 showing.

Right now all three incumbents appear strong and evenly matched, which may not leave Google much of a hole.

Microsoft Xbox persevered only because of Microsoft's deep pockets not because they necessarily did anything different enough to attract gamers. It was not a successful console.

Funny, I know someone else who has deep pockets.

Google has deep pocket, but has a habit of abandoning projects that aren't immediate successes.

Above all the Xbox had Halo, google doesn't seem to have anything unique up their sleeve.

To add on to this, I remember Gates said _something publicly like "I expect to lose about a billion dollars on it before it pans out" when launching xbox. I remember that it just seemed a very genuine "I think we should be in this market long term, and I know we'll lose a lot of money to get there. But we can afford it."

I'm pretty sure Xbox Live had something to do with MS's success.

Success? You mean they saw it as one area they did better? Microsoft considering killing off the xbox after the fist iteration because the sales figures were not where they hoped it would be and it was costing them.

And when Sony launched the PlayStation no one believed they could compete with Nintendo and Sega..

The Playstation was originally supposed to be the next Nintendo console...