I dunno... the next Xbox is still possibly up to 18 months away, you could get out something new, if you'd been working on it already for a while, before the 360 goes on the back burner and I don't think it'd be the worst thing to do, franchises have survived over generations before now.
But it just seems like Microsoft has no... innovation or imagination. They've got their core franchises and they do nothing with them besides put out new ones. Admittedly it doesn't help that I'm not too bothered about those franchises - I don't like Gears much, Halo does little for me. I like Forza, and it actually looks like they might do something new with that, but even that has question marks over it since they've not actually shown any gameplay yet.
It doesn't help, of course, that this generation has been so long. Companies will take bigger punts on new platforms. But Microsoft just don't seem to care about their games any more. They've got their studios and say 'We need a new Gears, go', while they spend all their time pissing about with Kinect (which I'm yet to encounter a single soul who gives a shit about it) and media content deals, which are meaningless to the UK market. Microsoft is obsessed with making the 360 an all in one set top box, and sod the core use it has.
It's not a surprise that Microsoft's conference was poor again, it basically turned out exactly as I said it would on the first page, and besides Smart Glass anyone could have guessed that keynote's layout 6 months ago. I guess the upside is next year will certainly see them push something new at us, a new console.