You know, for kids!

Microsoft supporters looking for a ray of sunshine amid the storm clouds of Windows 8’s user antipathy and Windows Phone’s trifling market share often cite the Xbox as the one example of how the company has found mass-market success in a new consumer segment. So at a time when Windows itself is under unprecedented threat, and the future of computing looks to be leaving the company behind, today’s Xbox One news from E3 is making me wonder why the company isn’t trying harder not to extinguish one of the few bright spots its future may have held.

Would it be absurd to suggest that there are forces within Microsoft who have something to gain from bringing the whole company down? Yes. But if there’s an alternative narrative that explains why Microsoft is repeating many of the mistakes that Sony made with its PS3 launch, please enlighten me. So far, the similarities are uncanny. The playbook reads something like this:

1. Lose sight of your target audience

Sony’s lofty ambition was to launch a set-top box that would be not just your games console, but a gateway to your whole connected life. In 2005, Ken Kutaragi announced to attendees of the company’s E3 press conference that the PS3 would feature two HDMI ports, three Ethernet sockets, and memory card readers for SD, Memory Stick and CompactFlash. Fortunately, much of that waste was scaled back by the time the machine launched, but the focus on non-game uses surely cost the company engineering resources that would have been better spent developing compelling games and gaming technology. More so than photo viewers, video editors and the like, I would argue.

Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal last month gained notoriety for its emphasis on being a new TV device rather than a new gaming platform. At a time when the nature of TV is fundamentally changing, it’s stupefying that the company is embracing the past of television rather than its future: nothing says anachronistic like bundling an IR blaster with a next-gen console. And nothing says that you’re ignoring your target audience like devoting the big reveal to a completely different market.

2. Get the launch price very, very wrong

Spectators rightly balked at Kutaragi-san’s suggestion that fans would want the PS3 so badly that they’d work a second job in order to afford its launch price. To remind: $499 for the basic model and $599 for a premium SKU.

That was in 2006, nearly two years before the first iPhone games hit the marketplace. In the years that passed, the established console gaming companies stood by and watched the mobile upstarts eat their lunch, leaving them just scraps of market share, and product prices eroded to the extent that trying to charge even a few dollars for a game in the highly competitive mobile space is a kiss of death. Freemium as in beermium is the new normal for mobile. Can consoles fight the trend?

The tealeaves aren’t looking good. Attendees of Nintendo’s GDC keynote in 2011 will remember Satoru Iwata’s pleading cry to developers to resist the currents of price erosion and to double-down on trying to make high-value games a compelling proposition. It was wishful thinking. Shortly after the keynote, the company watched sales of its new 3DS console fall off a cliff, and was forced to reduce its price from $249 to $169, an unprecedented six months after launch.

Their next console launch, the Wii-U, went arguably worse. At the time of writing, the machine’s been available for seven months, and Nintendo are still demanding the original $299 price point. But with weekly sales charts showing the Wii-U being outsold by the original Wii, now six years old, it’s looking like an increasingly untenable position.

The good news for Nintendo is that, at least for the 3DS, sales are looking much healthier since the price drop. So, at a time when the marketplace has never been so price-sensitive, MS are asking $499 for the One? Good luck with that.

3. Get Phil Harrison to tell customers it’s all for the best

If sabotaging one of the few divisions of Microsoft with a bright future was the aim, stealing the PS3’s launch playbook is the right way to go about it. And it’s an amusing coincidence that Phil Harrison, Sony’s apologist for the PS3 at the time of launch, is now reprising that role at Microsoft.

It’s a fanciful thought that there are forces within that company who stand to gain from bringing it all down, Hudsucker Proxy-style. But while it’s a stretch to believe that Microsoft is full of super-smart people conspiring to fail, it’s also hard to believe that it’s manned by people who are trying to succeed but are dumb enough to be responsible for their recent litany of strategic disasters, from alienating Windows users with an unfamiliar and deeply flawed Windows 8 UX, to taking advantage of gamers with the Xbox One price, focus and draconian DRM.

If The Hudsucker Proxy is a fitting analog for what’s happening behind the scenes, Phil’s an unfortunate choice of patsy. To his credit, he’s not as dumb a person as Norville Barnes was. But to Microsoft’s detriment, he’s also not as smart.