The original Xbox console was short-lived compared to a typical console generation, and now we have the very simple reason why: it was a financial disaster for Microsoft.
It’s fairly common knowledge that Microsoft lost more than $4 billion dollars on the OG Xbox, and it’s probably also pretty common to infer that that’s the reason it was killed ahead of schedule to make room for the Xbox 360, but now we know that to be explicitly true thanks to the guy who was in charge of Xbox at the time.
Former Xbox boss Peter Moore appeared on the Gamertag Radio podcast (timestamped here) and at one point was asked why Xbox decided to end its first console early.