PlayStation 4 Pro? Ruh-Roh, Microsoft

For a brief, shining moment, Microsoft's nifty new Xbox One S dominated the video game headlines. And then Sony and its PlayStation 4 Pro happened. And now everything is different. Again.

Coming into this generation of consoles, I felt very strongly that Microsoft would ride its Xbox 360 momentum to great success while Sony would stumble along like it had been at the time, seemingly never able to get anything right. Key to this, I thought, were the ardently loyal Xbox fans, who had weathered Microsoft's $1 billion warranty fix for the Xbox 360, in many cases happily sending their consoles back multiple times just so they could keep playing. Even Apple couldn't hope for such loyalty.

Boy, did I get that one wrong.

This week, Sony confirmed that it has sold over 40 million PlayStation 4 consoles, over double the number of Xbox Ones that Microsoft has sold. But that's just recent news: From the moment both consoles debuted in late 2013, the PS4 has outpaced Xbox One, so strongly in fact that Microsoft simply stopped providing sales numbers.

And that previous generation of consoles? Many still seem to remember that the Xbox 360 outsold the PlayStation 3. But it turns out that was a temporary condition, due in part to the Xbox 360 being released a year earlier than than the PS3, and in part to a temporary---and fleeting---mid-lifecycle bump from Kinect. If you look at the sales figures now, you will see something that may surprise you: As it turns out, Sony beat Microsoft. The PS3 outsold the Xbox 360.

What I and many others did find odd when the new console generation first launched in 2013, however, was that Microsoft seemed to be making the same mistakes with Xbox One that Sony had, previously, with the PS3. Its console was more expensive, but Microsoft stubbornly insisted that the price differential was deserved, because the Xbox One came with a Kinect, which it saw as key to the console's success. (Sony did the same with the PS3, which featured a then-expensive Blu-ray drive. The cheaper Xbox 360 was just DVD.)

We now know that not to be the case, though to be fair, the quick rise and fall of the Kinect for Xbox 360 was all the clue we really needed. Kinect added fully $100 to the price of Microsoft's console, and has proven quite uninteresting to most customers. So while the cheaper PS4 dashed out of the gates with the speed of Usain Bolt, the Xbox One lurched and staggered, directionless.

(Some will point, too, to Microsoft's mixed marketing messages ahead of the Xbox One launch. That is absolutely part of it as well.)

Anyway, with almost three years behind us and the PS4 outselling Xbox One by roughly 2-to-1, both Sony and Microsoft have come to the same conclusions about how and when this generation of consoles will be improved. And instead of using the old playbook, where a console generation was only changed mid-stream for cost reduction, this time will be different. The PS4 and Xbox One will be updated in ste...