Jez, brilliant piece. I really do think MS had a rational vision for the Series S -- less power, but enough so that all games that run at X FPS at 4K will still look and run the same X FPS at 1440. If they had achieved that, for everyone with 1080p or 1440p screens, the Xbox Series S is all they need. From your reporting though, sounds like games don't do that. They do NOT run as well on the Series S at 1440 as on the Series X at 4K. I'm curious if you know why.
Maybe they should lean into their original reasoning and just drop the target resolution to 1080p (if devs still want to do 1440, fine, but not required and not promoted for the console itself): Series X for 4K and includes a larger drive, Series S for 1080, but other than that, they game the same.
In terms of pixel moving, 1440 is about 44.4% of 4K (3.686 megapixels vs. 8.294 megapixels), so I would very roughly assume that the Series S needs to be about 50% as powerful as the Series X to yield the exact same FPS in any given scene (only referring to GPU here, it should have the same CPU for all the non-graphical calculations). I suspect the reality of needed processing power doesn't exactly align with pixel counts, so the S should have a bit more than 44.4% the power of the X, but something in that ballpark. Of course, my knowledge of graphics processing is limited, so this could be off.
Regardless of the original technical analysis, I think MS suffers from Nadella's cloud focus to the exclusion of all else across the board. Windows is losing OS marketshare to Mac, even in the enterprise. Mobile OS cratered and has since been abandoned, which forces MS to fight on multiple fronts with one hand already cut off. Xbox suffers the problems Jez points out so well in this article. Hardware updates across the board (e.g. Surface lines) are slow and don't seem to get a lot of focus.
Even if we stipulate that Nadella is 100% correct that cloud focus is the smart play for MS in both the short and long term, that doesn't mean it's OK to falter on everything else. If McDonalds made the best burgers, but their fries and service sucked, most people would stop eating there. If Chevy made the fastest cars (or most fuel efficient or safest or any other individual attribute), but lagged on all the others, sales would plummet.
In other words, while it's good to focus and know your core strengths, you can't take that to the extreme of being bad at everything else your customers care about or you'll lose them.
Microsoft doesn't seem to understand the importance of excellence in execution or the end-user experience. This seems to be a flaw in their corporate culture that is impacting all its end-user facing products and services (both consumer and enterprise). Note that for those who think this is just a lack of interest in consumer markets, no. In enterprise, we have the same problem with MS. It's a lack of interest in the user experience, wherever that user may be.
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