Comment by natbro

Well put, and although I may be somewhat biased, I agree -- financial muscle only gave us the ability to get on the field, it doesn't help you win or have a long-term strategy. The original hardware profile (PC-like so tools were available) and including a HDD was what allowed us to get game developers on-board quickly. Including the HDD and the NIC were also the bets, and as I tried to say in my original post, these were the innovations and the bets on the living-room Trojan horse -- we could afford to include these things because the console business model involved an audience size, a higher bill-of-material and a payback model which things like set-top-boxes and WebTV did not. Securing a few awesome first- and second-/third-party games exclusively to the console was also a critical tactic early on. I remain somewhat surprised that outside Halo there are no longer standout exclusive titles. I don't know why that effort has been dropped, that's stupid, too.