In July 2010, on the back of the newly redesigned Xbox 360 and shelf-clearing sales on the old model, Microsoft enjoyed one of its strongest months of non-holiday console sales ever. So while the Xbox 360 managed to best its console counterparts this July, it was also "the first month that the Xbox 360 saw a year-over-year decline since December 2009." That fact doesn't bother Microsoft product manager David Dennis, who told Joystiq, "If you actually jump back two years and look at what the typical run-rate is in the middle of the summer, it's pretty close. We're actually a little above where it was."

Considering the first Xbox console only enjoyed a four-year lifespan before the Xbox 360 arrived on the scene, Microsoft doesn't have a lot of institutional knowledge to rest on when it comes to maintaining a vibrant platform late in a console's lifecycle. But six years in, and the Xbox 360 has managed to reinvent itself thanks to Kinect. "Console transitions are expensive," Dennis said. "They're expensive for platform companies like ourselves and they're expensive for the third parties that have to learn new programming languages and learn new architectures."