Success comes in many guises. Most people would agree that 2007 was a successful year for the Xbox 360 - a year when the firm's head-start over rival Sony was used to great effect, and when the console's software line-up was widely considered to be one of the strongest the industry has ever seen.
It was the year in which Halo 3 arrived, was critically acclaimed, and sold around 8 million copies - and perhaps most impressively of all, it was the year when Halo 3 almost seemed buried in an avalanche of superb games, whereas in any previous year it would have stood astride the software landscape like a colossus. It was the year when Xbox Live user figures passed the 10 million mark, and the year when Microsoft registered its second ever profitable quarter for the Xbox division (although it almost certainly slid back into a loss in the following quarter).
A good year, then? Well - maybe. Success is multi-faceted, and it's important to look at it from many angles before you make up your mind and stick a label on something. There are other ways in which 2007 was a terrible year for Microsoft - and in some regards, the company's lacklustre showing at CES in Las Vegas last week may be a hangover from those failings.
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