It takes a small group of motivated, willing and determined people to change the world. Money speeds up the process, considerably.

BBC abandons £100 million project, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22651126

semi-abandoning of google glass

If my memory was better i should have been able to recall more multi-million $ projects abandoned by these big companies and...

you know what - they continue their business as usual - they haven't collapsed

if we extrapolate to big gaming studios, then rather than saying they can't risk new ideas - we should say ; they can absorb the risk

(maybe for every 5 projects they get right, they can (risk)absorb 2-3 failures)

That Microsoft list is a bad example here. Zune probably could have done well with a better marketing team behind it. Unfortunately they launched as an also-ran, chose some bad styles for the exterior, and picked some terrible naming. XNA was not abandoned, it was designed for a single thing and actually did it very well. It was (and still is) a wrapper for the DX9 functionality enabling people to make games that run on XBox 360, and PC, and a specific phone. It was not meant to grow to new features, it was meant for a very specific class of equipment and it succeeded very well. Look at the thriving marketplace on the game console for evidence of that. There was no need for updates since the game console is not a moving target.

Microsoft gets pitches for new business products all the time. They reject most of them because they are not a scale that works for the company. Why spend money developing a product with an expected $2M revenue? That is small potatoes, farm it out to a subsidiary or pass on the idea. The company proper can spend their time on a product line with billions in revenue -- hundreds or thousands of times more money -- with a global high-profile product that boosts both their bottom line and their brand value.