You know, it's not just the fact that Microsoft backtracked that was of interest; it was how they literally put so much, and yet so little, fight into defending the old ones. When I say so much, I mean that it seemed like literally right up until they announced the reversal, you wouldn't have found a scrap of quotation on any Microsoft employee mentioning that, okay, maybe it wasn't such a hot idea. All the interviews were Future of Gaming this, the Cloud that, Digital Is Inevitable this, which made it nothing short of a wide-eyed shock when they randomly announced; "Okay, FINE, forget it."
But what I mean by so little is that, essentially, all they DID was talk. There were so many other things they could have done, concrete steps to set them apart from the competition, but they simply didn't because, well, it would have cost more money. Family Share was pretty much the only sizable pro they mentioned (with the fuzzy communication leaving unanswered questions even for that) and everything else was vague Eventually claims. Like how promoting a digital marketplace might eventually lead to new modes of licensing- the only suggestions I could find were things like renting digital games, and Microsoft never actually suggested them, was usually whatever media was interviewing them- and other benefits that 'Could' happen. Comparisons to Steam only began after a self-proclaimed 'Xbox One Engineer' wrote about it on a text dump on Pastebin (a text dump that, to clarify, could have been written by ANYONE and offered no accountability or liability to Microsoft in terms of carrying any of this out,)
Now, if Microsoft was convinced that this was indeed going to be a huge improvement for gamers, and bring them cool, justifiable features that totally made up for what was being taken or restricted, then frankly they should have stuck to their guns and kept the policies as they were. Sure, the pre-orders would have been an unmitigated disaster, sure it probably would have meant the launch period would have given the competition a huge boost, but if they had complete and utter faith that this Future they touted so enthusiastically was 100%, undeniably beneficial to the gamer, and for mystic monkey reasons they couldn't actually come out and list all these awesome qualities- the most detail about Family Share, for example, only came out after they had cancelled it in the wake of reversing the original policies- then okay! Launch the console. Let glowing reviews speak for themselves. If the product is shown to be objectively better- providing greater freedom of use and quality features than the competition- then they would have made up for lost ground pretty quickly. Heck, I know I would have bought it the day digital games became noticeably cheaper than disc-based counterparts, the day you could sell used digital games as someone on this site claimed they were planning, etc, etc.
I was not, however, going to buy it BEFORE that happened, and certainly not because I was told it 'Could' happen.
That they instead backtracked a week after their initial announcement suggests that, no, they didn't have a great deal of faith on the new policies being objectively superior in terms of customer benefit; that even when the consoles were out, and people had the concrete list of pros and cons for each system, the cons of the One would still prove heavier in the eyes of a sizable chunk of their consumer base.
