it seems the ps4 has sold 10 million in 9 months. while the xbox has sold 5 million not bad but using the apple business model of treating customers like employees seems to have backfired for microsoft. they may be able to catch up, but catching up will be tough

Too many rich people I say.

I might have been out of the loop for too long but... I thought MS had the best exclusives? (And I'm usually a Sony fanboy, having a PS and PS3, and no X-box consoles myself).

It isn't sold, its "sold through". This means they have sold that many to retailers. Its just marketing buzzwords :P

It isn't sold, its "sold through". This means they have sold that many to retailers. Its just marketing buzzwords

Sony have stated 10 million units sold to customers. They usually use "shipped" for sold to retailers.

"Just in case that wasn't clear, that's sold through to consumers," Ryan said.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/223211/PlayStation_4_hits_10_million_units_sold.php

I thought MS had the best exclusives?

Depends on the individual, only exclusive Xbox one has or is getting any time soon that I want is Forza. Even the new IPs don't look fun to play, the art style of Sunset overdrive is awesome but the game doesn't look like it flows very well from the trailers I expected something akin to Jet Set Radio fast paced and some of the effects from time stopping in Quantum Break look really cool but it's yet another bland third person cover shooter with a bit of slow mo kung fu thrown in.

As someone working for a company making a PS4 exclusive, this news is very good for me.

I might have been out of the loop for too long but... I thought MS had the best exclusives? (And I'm usually a Sony fanboy, having a PS and PS3, and no X-box consoles myself).

MS created a whole lot of FUD around themselves leading up to launch. There's still people who think that you can't re-sell games, or you have to be online to play, or whatever other backflips they made...

Also, the PS3 and 360 are so completely different hardware-wise, that it's impossible to do a fair apples and oranges comparison between them. In practice though, they coincidentally end up about equal in performance.
However, the PS4 and Xbone are almost identical hardware-wise, except that the PS4 is just hands-down better... I don't know how much that's influencing purchases, but I bet it will in the long run when Call of Duty 12 looks better / runs smoother on PS4.

It isn't sold, its "sold through". This means they have sold that many to retailers. Its just marketing buzzwords

Sell-through is a percentage. E.g. if Microsoft has shipped 5M units and actually sold 4M units, their sell-through is 80%.

From what I've seen, Sony is reporting actual sales to consumers and MS is reporting units shipped to retailers... So, MS is losing pretty badly!

It isn't sold, its "sold through". This means they have sold that many to retailers. Its just marketing buzzwords

Sold through means sold through retail to end users. Sold in means sold to retailers. First a product gets sold in, then it hopefully gets sold through.

The unfortunate facts are that Microsoft shot themselves in the foot early on, in five big ways --

1. Failure on the Digital-download / "DRM" / resale messaging. The stipulations on (downloaded-only) software weren't that ominous, and they failed to message clearly that A) digital-downloads could be lent to friends, and B) retail-disks worked the same as always.
2. Failure to communicate and demonstrate the benefit of Xbox One being backed by cloud compute. Lots of awesome stuff they can do with this, and Sony basically doesn't have this and can't build it with the expertise and scale Microsoft already has deployed. Lost opportunity.
3. The GPU hardware came through a little weaker than it ought to have. They should have shot for 2-4 more compute units (adding another 128-256 shader cores), that would have made the graphics disparity negligible, instead of just 'manageable'.
4. Kinect 2.0 is neat, and far improved, kudos for having it available day-1 and treating it as a first class citizen. That said, not everyone needs or wants it, and it was a mistake to tie it to the console if it meant a higher price-tag than the competition by $100.
5. Especially given all of the above, $500 was simply too high a price-tag. Game sales channels were murky, its biggest technical advantage was barely mentioned, its GPU hardware is just far enough behind to be noticeable, and the justification they trotted out (again, barely mentioning cloud compute) was something a lot of people didn't want. That doesn't add up to a $100 premium. Sony had already learned that lesson, its too bad Microsoft hadn't taken it to heart as well.

Less damning, but frankly the industrial design and external PSU of the XBox One is less appealing and less elegant than the PS4, too.

If they'd have launched at $400 with Kinect, or $500 with a modestly beefier GPU I think things would be sitting a little more even now. As it is, they have some ground to make up. However, its still early in the race and neither player has met the critical mass where they and their publishers/developers make real money. This will be a 100million+ unit (each) race in the end, Its basically turn-three of the first lap in a 10 lap race or more, with one of the competitors having stumbled--I daresay fallen down--at the starting line.

The numbers today are concerning, but not damning. Microsoft is a big ship, so it takes them awhile to correct course, but when they do they've got a lot of horsepower to bring to bare. I have both, I like both. I think as time goes on each will find their stride in somewhat different niches, with plenty of overlap. I also speculate that developers are tapping less of the Xbox One's potential now than they are of the PS4 due to the ESRAM configuration. I think in 5 years devs will be getting around twice as much out of each console as they do now, but with the current disparity shrinking proportionally.