Consoles are plug and play. With PC's there's a chance you might actually have to do something to get the thing to work. For the average idiot in America that's too complicated.

Cashing in on another market. Even IF the pc market gets reduced by 50%, if they can snatch 50% of the console market as well, they'll end up ahead.

MS didn't kill PC gaming. Publishers who are incredibly tight-fisted now are trying to kill it. They only green-light console games first because they know they can be rapidly developed. Then they green light PC games, but only give a minimum amount of time to ship it. So we end up with good console games, and absolutely fucking terrible ports.

When publishers have driven the current gen of titles into the ground, and the products console gamers get offered keep sucking more and more (Read as: Medal of Honor), eventually someone with the purse stings is going to ask why they quit green lighting original PC development...and the cycle will start anew.

Interesting, I've now heard three different numbers for how much they're spending on marketing Kinect; $300, $400, and $500 million. I don't see why spending that amount of money indicates Kinect will fail. Given their past with phones, as you mentioned, I would think that if they see Kinect as a failure they would quickly drop it and try to sweep it under the rug. They could be trying to hype it up to the point that everyone has to have one, but I don't get that sense.

Mind you, I still think Kinect will fail, but because it is overpriced. It's a pretty cool piece of technology, and it wins points over Move for not being a shameless copy of the Wii, but $150 is just too much. If Microsoft agreed with me on this, though, I don't think they would be planning to spend so much marketing it.

Anyway, to get to the point of the OP, I don't think Microsoft (willfully) tried to harm PC gaming. Consoles in general just have more advantages that make them more attractive (not to say PCs don't have advantages, they just aren't as big in comparision).

Xia already mentioned uniformity, and this is huge. On consoles, developers don't have to spend a lot of time and money making sure their games work on a wide range of configurations, and players don't have to worry about meeting any sort of minimum requirements. Some will argue that is just console gamers being lazy and stupid *coughMylescough* but when most people just want to blow something up/kill something/raise an empire/etc they don't want to bother making sure their graphics card is compatible, or that their drivers are updated to the right version, or that their brand of mouse is compatible with the game (I've had a problem with a game where it didn't recognize the scroll wheel on my mouse, so I couldn't zoom). Consoles make everything easier; PC gamers are just used to it being hard

The next big advantage in favor of consoles is price. Yes, PCs can be used for more than just gaming, but that doesn't change the fact that they are more expensive. Look at it from the prospective of a parent (ie, the people buying games without doing significant research) buying for a kid's birthday/Christmas/whatever; you can buy them a $700 PC or a $200 Wii. Which would you choose to buy for your kid? It doesn't help that consoles are slowly adding capabilities that were previously exclusive to PCs, like streaming video from Netflix or other places and surfing the web. Throw on a printer, word processor, and a keyboard and you could do pretty much everything with an Xbox 360 that most people use their PC for.

Again, all of that is not to say that PC gaming is inheritly inferior to console gaming or that PCs do not have their advantages. It's just that from a developer and publisher standpoint, the advantages of consoles (low price, uniformity, stability) outweigh the PC advantages (modding, openness). Modding is great, but except in very rare cases it's not going to move units of a game very significantly.

None of this would change if the Xbox had never been released. Microsoft is not (and was not) trying to kill PC gaming, but it hasn't done much to help it either.

I'd say Microsoft is indeed interested in eliminating the PC game market and replace it with consoles only. After all they sell the 360s, not the pcs.  They are not interested in Windows as anything but a business productivity base, not a gaming one.  They don't benefit from windows PC games being sold, unlike 360 consoles and games sold.  They get lots of earnings licensing the 360 to console game makers. Not so with PC game makers.

Microsoft is looking at different avenues with the PC Gaming scene.  PC Gaming is no longer the focus of the industry and won't be again.  This is simple evolution.  One of the better things of recent years from Microsoft is the continual development of the XNA Framework, promoting independant developers and assisting them with tech that works on both the Xbox 360 and the PC Platform and handles a lot of the crap that trips up most aspiring developers.  I feel that Microsoft is treated as the bad guys more often than they deserve.

What it is worth depends on the games that use it, and use it well. Currently there is only one game series that might use it in away that the other controllers cannot do just as well, and it has been awhile since a game was released for it. It was also a series of PC game. The series I refer to is the Black and White series.

Buying Steam is the most logical thing anyone has mentioned MS doing. I think Gabe wouldn't sell though; not unless MS offered him a billion or so.

I guess my point is though, MS already has the PC market cornered through both the OS and intermediaries. And as was said, the industry loves a standard, even if it's an imperfect one. Short of someone else developing a DirectX replacement that doesn't work for MS....they don't have to worry. \

To get the level of access need to have a graphics library that comes anywhere close in preformance to DirectX, you have to pay Microsoft to get the licence to use the needed API; therefore it does not really matter to Microsoft. And DirectX if free so it would be hard to compete if you charge for the library, and if you do not then there is little incentive to try competing.

Though console gaming hurts pc gaming, it wont kill it without a lot of changes.  There are types of games that just wont work on console unless you dramatically dumb them down as to fit the console controllers.  I mean really what PC gamer doesn't die a little inside when they see a game they were waiting for with hit PC and X-box or PS3?  You know you will see a game striped down to fit consoles and the controls will be terrible.

Microsoft could end PC gaming as we know it, if they just released a keyboard / mouse controllers for xbox.

Don't get me wrong, I love tinkering, but all pc advantages go away next round of hardware, especially if they allow you to hook up your mouse/ keyboard of choice, and monitor and your off.

Kinect would never work for the ever-popular shooters that have arrived on the Xbox.  These are games which make the best use of the Xbox controllers, and sell a lot.

Additionally, if you could get two players going on that Star Wars game that was demonstrated, there's a good chance that while waving your lightsabers around you could smack someone in the face for real.

I'm not exactly thrilled with the controllers available right now, it always seems to me that the shoulder buttons are harder to push than anything else, with the result that I keep hopping in and out of the weapon or power menus in Mass Effect 2.  Gripping something that was designed for slightly smaller hands than mine leads to discomfort after a while.  So there is appeal with Kinect in that the gamer's hands will be relieved of the need to make small repetitive movements or hold onto something for upwards of an hour.  But those hands are capable of generating lots of different input information, and it's hard to see how Kinect will make up for the loss of two thumbsticks.