Following microsoft as alaways despite microsoft destroying their business.
I don't fucking understand it.
MS has been the one following Sony, not the opposite. Sony did consoles, game subs and cloud gaming before than MS. And like MS has been making computer games since the early-mid '80s. Sony has been the market leader and MS the last one in the race, so it's MS who normally copies what works trying to catch up and not the oppposite.
But both make AAA games, which every gen get more expensive and this one are costing over $300M, meaning they need to sell more than around 9M copies to be profitable and isn't sustainable to do it only in a single console for most of their games.
If they wanted to have a profitable, sustainable business they had to expand to GaaS and multiplatform.
MS destroyed their console because is part of their plan to slowly become a full multiplatform publisher moving to Windows as their home platform.
It's destroying basically for putting all their games day one on PC and GP, something Sony isn't doing and won't do because it's a financial suicide. And well, having a worse exclusive lineup and 3rd party support during these 20 years also has been a key reason of why MS never has been able to catch up and keeps dying.
Perfoming a Sega will help MS Gaming to become stronger than ever even if killing their own console, because in PS+PC+Nintendo+Mobile they will make way, way more money than they ever did in Xbox. Specially having spent around $100B in acquisions, and more that will follow somewhere in the future.
It's almost the polar opposite case of Sony: they are the console and game subscriptions market leaders, depending on the quarter or year also the market leader in the whole gaming. Plus are breaking records and growing in basically all their areas. So Sony doubles down on their console, while also successfully growing in other platforms to compensate the rising costs of AAA games and hardware components and also grow and diversify their audience.
Why can't they be like nintendo?
Because Unlike Nintendo Sony makes very expensive high end AAA games and consoles, so they need extra revenue and profit from expanding to GaaS and other platforms like PC, mobile or movie/tv shows.