I kind of disagree with this. They made networking and online gaming on consoles finally a thing most home consumers were interested in. Sure, there were some earlier forays into online gaming/networking on previous consoles (SegaNet, for example), but those were generally pretty niche. Sega only included a dial-up adapter by default, while the Xbox shipped with an Ethernet adapter. Shipping the Xbox with Ethernet made networking on the box pretty simple right at the time when people started buying home routers and broadband internet and opened up the console to easy LAN gaming.
Microsoft made Xbox Live a pretty massive feature of the console a year after launch. While Xbox Live launched a year after the console shipped, I'd still say the planning of it and including the Ethernet port was something nobody else in the console gaming world was doing and ended up defining the console gaming future.
A big part of the success of the Xbox (and maybe it's not the Japan destroyer the fanboys wanted it to be) was that they really really let it be its own product, and develop an ecosystem. They not only made it a "PC for your TV" which was widely what it was held as on release, but also expanded the capabilities of what a console was expected to do.
Sadly they also popularized and solidified the "pay to play games online" feature of consoles, vs the "online play is free except for MMOs" that PCs normally have.
I kind of disagree with this. They made networking and online gaming on consoles finally a thing most home consumers were interested in. Sure, there were some earlier forays into online gaming/networking on previous consoles (SegaNet, for example), but those were generally pretty niche. Sega only included a dial-up adapter by default, while the Xbox shipped with an Ethernet adapter. Shipping the Xbox with Ethernet made networking on the box pretty simple right at the time when people started buying home routers and broadband internet and opened up the console to easy LAN gaming.
Microsoft made Xbox Live a pretty massive feature of the console a year after launch. While Xbox Live launched a year after the console shipped, I'd still say the planning of it and including the Ethernet port was something nobody else in the console gaming world was doing and ended up defining the console gaming future.