With search the landscape is a bit different, but we shouldn't be so shortsighted as to count microsoft out of the game or think that bing will never gain >50% marketshare. We could look at articles like this in 3-4 years and laugh out how off the mark it was, just like the articles in game magazines bashing the xbox in the early 2000's.
No, you really can't.
Look at PS3 compared to PS2, GameCube versus nintendo 64, Saturn versus megadrive.
In fact it's practically an industry rule that you always fail after a successful generation of console! A betting man would reckon on the Xbox 3 being a flop.
Wii reached an audience no console ever reached, thanks to the titles and controllers. I'm betting Project Natal will take over a big slice of that market, unless Nintendo really steps it up.
Most xboxes are in teenage boys bedrooms not in living rooms.
The impressive part is how they've been able to convince some people that the xbox is a success.
Ofcourse you can attribute that to my age, and the fact that I don't know too many teenagers, but for the teens in my family, if they are gamers at all, what they have is a PC in their bedroom. Console-gaming is if not exclusively at least largely a social thing, and thus makes more sense to have in a room made for socializing.
While my argument isn't backed by solid data and mostly relies on my own experiences, you can't really claim yours is any better either.
As for as the Xbox 360 goes right now it is a massive success. It is one of the top three consoles in a market where there used to only be two. That's big achievement in itself.
Please, if you're going to compare numbers, be aware of what you're comparing. The Wii, Xbox360 and PS3 are only similar if you're an outsider and can't realize the apple to oranges comparison that's taking place.
The Wii's major feature is that it's a family entertainment system and not a gaming console. The reason it's sold so much is because, as many others have stated, it managed to breach into new market segments. Yet when I talk with any person that dedicates a significant portion of their time to playing games (ie a gamer) they never talk about the Wii, they talk about the Modern Warfare 2, PS3 and Xbox360.
The part of Microsoft that makes xbox along with the zine and PC games made a profit of 0.2 Billion this year and 0.5 Billion the year before.
Large companies tend to walk off their own skyscrapers. Microsoft toppled IBM with the "PC on every desk" mantra. In turn, Microsoft never won on the Internet, because they just never understood that humans network. Phone+cable+Internet companies are begging for a sassy upstart to eat their lunch when competition opens up. American car companies missed game-changing trends in consumer automobiles towards fuel efficiency.
Should Microsoft abandon search? Probably not, but they're more likely to make money if they attack markets that only have awful products. Attacking a market with strong loyalties and gold-standard type products seems like a fool's errand
I think the difference in quality between Google and Bing search results is negligible; at this point it's just a matter of mindshare as to whether people, on average, go to www.google.com or to www.bing.com when they want to look something up. There's no vendor lock-in propping up Google, to the extent that there is behind the Windows or iTunes monopolies. Mindshare can be altered, Microsoft just needs to figure out how to do it.
In technology, it is rare that a leader loses it's place in the market. More often, a new technology is pioneered by a new company that makes the old technology less relevant.
IBM never lost the mainframe market, but did not dominate the PC market. Google did not take over PCs, but dominates search. There are many more examples like this.
There was also a company called Novell that pretty much invented the business of networking PC's, but where are they now?
Google supplanted Altavista largely because they made huge strides in a rather new field. While it's definitely possible, it's a little hard to image someone coming along with a web search that's impressive enough to supplant Google. It's more likely that "search" would evolve into something not entirely comparable to today's search, and replace them.