Tyrannical

Killing Off the Original Xbox: A Big Microsoft Mistake

"They could have re-engineered it to make it far cheaper to manufacture (just as Sony did with the PSOne) and kept on selling it for another five years as part of a two product line"

No, they could not. If the author bothered to do any research, he would have realized that this is one of the reasons they did launch the 360 early.

Since they did NOT own the CPU/GPU designs (intel and Nvidia did) they could NOT do cost reduction designs like Sony did. They CAN do it with the 360, as Microsoft owns the CPU/GPU designs.