[WorldMaker]

Flight Simulator is an especially fun example because Microsoft didn't want to be in games at the time. It has been said that Bill Gates thought games were mostly a waste of time and worked very hard to make sure that the early many years of the company Microsoft had no games division. Microsoft bought Flight Simulator because it wasn't "entirely" a game, and was a good technical demo of PC capabilities. Microsoft wasn't trying to build a game studio. Microsoft "accidentally" built a game studio when people wanted Flight Simulator updates every couple of years. (Many of those people weren't even game players, but various users of Flight Simulator in non-game uses such as people using Flight Simulator as a learning tool or as they call it a "simulator".)

Maybe you can't force a game studio to happen, you have to accidentally walk into it?

[zinekeller]

Same for Xbox being (initially) seen as a deadweight to Microsoft. Microsoft is not even looking beyond office and enterprise when Nintendo and Sega were the players in the game console industry, but when Sony launched PlayStation (and the associated threat of a Sony-connected home entertainment and productivity system basically preventing Microsoft from selling Windows at home users), Microsoft just launched Xbox to counter PlayStation.

[WorldMaker]

Yes, but it's also weirder than that, because Microsoft was a hardware and software partner with Sega on the Dreamcast. Microsoft was hoping to keep the three-horse race between Nintendo, Sega, and Sony in tact by offering support for things that Sega had ceased operating in house. The Xbox may not have existed at all if Sega hadn't been trying to cut corners and outsourcing random bits of Dreamcast hardware/software to whoever would answer the call and Microsoft being in the weird spot where they felt like they had to answer that call.