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Getting All 1,700 Parts of the Xbox 360 to Market
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Microsoft is hoping its Xbox 360 will further the company's goal to 'link the Web and entertainment of all forms in consumers' living rooms,' the Wall Street Journal reports, but 'one manufacturing misstep -- a shortage of graphics chips or a recalled hard drive -- could derail those ambitions and drag Microsoft's unprofitable videogame business even deeper into the red.' The WSJ traces the 1,700 parts that go into the device through the supply chain -- from two southern China factories, Rotterdam, and on to Toledo, Memphis, and ultimately, retailers in the U.S. -- and looks at what could go wrong along the way."
Getting All 2*2*5*5*17 Parts of the Xbox 2*2*2*3*3*5 to Market
Doesn't Microsoft lose money on every X-box sold in the first place?
Granted I havn't read TFA, but how is this any different from any other relatively complex peice of hardware? And why would it fsck up MS?
Really, so if some hardware in the nex Xbox breaks or is recalled it will derail microsoft - would most other companies not be affected? What the?
I was recently in an IRC channel with basehead (who is an old tracking god, and now works for a video game company and is currently working on one of the 360 launch titles) who said:
The XBox360 does not have any standard stereo output. It either uses the Dolby digital, or it downsamples 5 channels together as 'mono'.
So anyone without a Dolby sound system is going to hear complete crap. Maybe this will change, but it will be launched this way. This sounds to me about as bad as a soundcard recall.
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OF #12 TORX SCREWS" sources at Micrsoft reveal...
Most things are only made of one or two parts with a very simple supply chain. In fact, the computer industry's previous champion of complexity was the Apple Macintosh which consisted of only two parts: 1 mouse button, and 1 everything else.
Actually this is an area that I hope M$ does well, for the same reason that I dislike their behavior in the OS market. If the Xbox does well and puts some pressure on Sony then hopefully features will be improved and prices driven down for both competitors.
Why would they expect failure now?
Microsoft *DOES* produce other devices and they know the manufacturing/shop floor management. (They run facilities and design the software that manages them)
I think MS knows what they're getting into.
Something I've not seen mentioned anywhere (even on MS's site) and thought I'd ask: does the xbox 2 has the ability to play xbox 1 games?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
If I can't bootstrap my own code the unit is worthless, recall the whole fucking lot!
But doesn't this hold true for all cutting-edge devices that rely on a single configuration to work? Dell to a degree are lucky because their inventory is built from off the shelf components which can be interchanged at short notice to give working product, but if you look at shortages of devices such as the Sony PSP, you find that there's a trade-off between time-to-market and component availability.
The upshot of this initial position is that over time the component costs come down, meaning a larger profit margin (or in the case of the X-box, a smaller loss), eventually leading to a machine redesign to minimise component count (look at the original Playstation configurations for examples of that), and eventually reducing the physical plastics cost my changing the form factor (PS and PS2).
Microsoft have chosen an interesting path with the 360; a combination of off-the-shelf components that are almost obsolete in retail channels such as the 20GB drive combined with unique items such as the processor and GPU. It's a neat strategy that reminds me of the way the Commodore Amiga was designed; custom chips for the guts of the machine supported by OTS components to keep costs down. It should be an interesting machine to watch, my only hope being that they aren't daft enough to supercede it too quickly.
Bill must really think videogames are super-important; they keep losing billions, but Microsoft just keeps on going back for more punishment.
It seems so odd that they'd use their monopoly on desktop productivity software to try to build a videogame empire: history says that those get swept away pretty easily as soon as someone out-innovates you and comes out with a super-console. You can't build insurmountable walls (like in productivity software) to hold back your competition indefinitely, because gamers just get rid of their old gear.
Furthermore, there are always new gamers, and they have no loyalty to your old games -- there's always new boys growing up who need a video game. If you can't keep them happy, Sony/Nintendo/Sega will.
Wouldn't MicroSoft get a better return on investment from just making more software that works well with Windows? Even cellphones and IM/email devices would seem to have more in common with their natural advantages in productivity software.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
And it seems to me that they spent more of their advertising budget on the fact of that One Mouse Button, than on that one everything else.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's right, we got the rights to all the components. That includes the CPU, wireless hardware, the bridges and even the GPU. So, if anyone along the way in the supply chain screws up by providing flakey hardware or limiting supply, we get a new supplier.
If you look at the Anandtech review where they disassemble the 360, you'll notice every component is branded with the Microsoft logo!
Now all the rabid anti-MSFT activists will head to Memphis to find the Ingram Micro distribution center and disrupt shipments. Hopefully they will eat some BBQ and visit Sun Studios while they are in town (skip Graceland...other than the trophy room, it's overrated).
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
You are correct of course...
Too bad people see it referenced that way in the movies so its 'true', you are fighting a losing battle.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
All he did was quote the original article you were supposed to read. Do you guys even think anymore?!
I'm getting a 360 already, shut up about the slashvertisements!!! ... Though I'll wait till next year [e.g. March] to pick mine up.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Some of us have wife and kids and can't go around pimping out our tv with such frivaleous hardware
Why in the world would someone in your position plunk down $400 for an Xbox 360? You can get a complete 6.1 HTIB (home theater in box) system for much less than that, and it will (surprisingly enough) sound pretty good.
It makes no sense to buy an Xbox 360 if you are going to plug it into a battery-operated 8" black-and-white portable TV. By the same token, it makes no sense to buy an Xbox 360 if you aren't willing to spend another $100-$200 for decent sound.
Shipping something which is essentially a dumb client to Windows XP Media Edition and is incapable of storing video doesn't sound like supporting entertainment of all forms to me. Even the the original XBox could be hacked into such a system, suggesting that MS deliberately crippled their new console.
Realistically anyone that can afford an xbox and can afford an HTDV can drop $150 on a halfway decent surround sound system.
I'm not sure there's anything wrong with microsoft trying to force people (particularly early adopters) into having the best possible xbox set up. These are the people that are blazing a trail and advertizing the xbox to the xmas 06 crowds.
If you really want 2.0, cant you just connect it to your stereo and tell the amp to do Phantom Center and Phantom Rear. It should do a far better job of downmixing than the xbox itself.
Furthermore by pushing out a digital signal, they'll do away with groundloop problems and the buzzing and hissing that cheap analog interconncts provide.
Just as word got out that Microsoft would limit supply of the new xbox in order to leverage the massive amounts of free press this gets( remember the Elmo press coverage? ), Microsoft pushes out a story of how fragile their production process is. Brilliant I say. Now it'll be easy to blame the supply chain instead of getting called on holding back production... Wait, isn't the WSJ.com usually a fee based site? Hmm, no problem getting to this article so I guess we have a sponsor to thank for this. Now who could that be? Can you say Microsoft? ;-)
;-) But I suspect that the losses they'll create with this new xbox will allow them to surpass the WinCE losses somewhat quicker. So they have that going for them.
Another interesting tidbit in the article was the $4 billion in xbox business losses since 2001! That's right up there with the ~$8 billion in losses for the Windows CE product lines. Hey, atleast they're consistant.
LoB
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The Reality of Markets by Russell Roberts speaks of "phenomena that are the product of human action but not of human design": examples include language, economies and the WWW, all which work with neither oversight nor designer.
In contrast many designed systems (CORBA, The Semantic Web, RDF, Ontologies) remain stunted and show little progress. Clay Shirky's writings: Web Services: It's So Crazy, It Just Might Not Work and The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview provide illuminating insight into why.
falls under the Home Entertainment Group posted in the black in the first quarter this year.
A breathless journalist discovers that putting a product thru manufacturing requires coordination of lots of small parts, from many different vendors and countries. Journalist also learns that a screw-up in any of these parts will cause a PROBLEM!
Here is a newsflash for Journalists: The xbox is trivial to manufacture compared to other products. Go tour a plant making large Xerox machines, or a Toyota factory, if you want to see something which actually has a challange to it.
This article seems more like an ad for what is in reality a small, cheap, and disposable PC with some ductwork in it, a technology that was used on mainframes 20 years ago. This smells like an attempt to make people believe in "genius which is xbox"
I think there should be a new rule for journalists (and for school teachers as well): You are not allowed to write/teach about something technical (math, science, engineering) until you have spent time doing it professionaly. No more "how they build the widget" articles unless you are a manufacturing engineer with factory experience. Cut down of some of this fluff.
the console gaming market is not about making money on the core hardware and never has been. It has always been about licensing/royalties, accessories, game sales, online gameplay subscriptions, etc. The business model supports this and both Sony and Microsoft will do very well with their consoles and sales. Microsoft is reportedly going to lose 76 dollars per XBox360 sold.
I was under the impression that EEs and manufacturing engineers usually designed things to be flexible. i.e., defining a range of resistors and capacitors to be used in the circuitry, allowing greater flexibility in manufacturing. Hard disks, screws, etc., would be fairly interchangeable in case of a supply shortage. Of course there would always be a few items which may be custom for the x-box, but I would assume that they would have at least two suppliers for these items or at worst get each supplier to produce the parts at more than one plant.
If a shortage in every single one of those 1,700 parts could cause the launch to be delayed, Microsoft has the worst engineers in the industry. Somehow I doubt that's the case.
Actually Ingram Micro no longer has a Memphis location. That one got shut down in favor of the Millington location. :P I worked there, just giving ya a heads-up. And knowing how crappy some of the shipping companies have been acting lately in here, (the Dell Laptop fiasco in my journal just being one that I've bothered reporting about,) I have a feeling it's not shortage of supplies/components, I'd be more worried about them getting lost or delayed. I rely upon my experience working many of the warehouses here in Memphis, and let me tell you, half of these guys probably only stopped smoking long enough to get the job, then went right back to it. I'll bet you a dollar. :)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
And getting a 2nd supplier for a component isn't quite as easy as you make it out. This is a better defense against what NVidia did to MS (withhold try to renegotiate the pricing) than for covering regular component shortages.
For a regular shortage, it'll take so long to get the 2nd source up and running (even with the rights to do so) that it won't save you a lot of pain.
But it eliminates the possibility of a company being able to withdraw their component and put your production on hold indefinitely.
I also doubt the hard and optical drive sourcing is handled this way. It's probably more like Xbox, where they simply make sure components are interchangable and thus they can change suppliers at will, instead of retaining the rights to make components themselves.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Or a Boeing 777?
And making sure all of those parts are in ample supply is trivial?
For that matter, how many "parts" does Windows XP have, and how is Microsoft managing to make sure they all work?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
What is claimed here seems extremely unlikely for a number of reasons.
/.ers seem to think. They are well aware of the number of people with stereo-only setups, and would have no reason to alienate them.
t connected.htm that's the cable page for the 360. Notice that all the cables there have stereo anologue audio outputs (the red and white RCA cables). Why would they include stereo outputs, if the sound out was only monaural?
/. it's entirely possible.
1) When you have a hardwre sound processor, it's no more difficult to mix to 2 channels than to 1 or any other combination supported. You'll notice that cards like the Audigy can change speaker configuration on the fly with no problems. Thus it would make no sense to deliperatly handicap the system in this manner.
2) Microsoft is not stupid, contrary to what many
3) A quick look at Microsoft's site reveals stereo outputs on all the cables. Have a look at http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/accessories/ge
So I'm going to guess that orignal poster is wrong. I can see one of three situations as to why:
1) The person he was talking to was not who he believed it to be. The number of pretenders on IRC is beyond count. It is easily possible someone was lying about who they were, and had enough knowledge to make it seem feasable to the uninformed.
2) The composer may be misinformed. Being good at composing and tracking music does not make one a sound expert. He may well misunderstand the capabilityes of the X-box.
3) The orignal poster may be lying about the conversation. Given the anti-MS attitudes on
Now of course I haven't had hand on an Xbox 360 so I cannot confirm for certianty that there is stereo output available, but I have a hard time believing there isn't. It wouldn't make sense, and all evidence suggests there is.
Also, even in the extremely unlikely event it was lacking, stereo folks aren't out of luck. All recievers made any time receantly that I'm aware of will happily downconvert 5.1 to stereo if requested. On mine, I simply push the "stereo" button. It disengages all the surround speakers and sub, and mixes everything to the front left and right speakers. The source cab be 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 DD or DTS, it doesn't matter, it will make it stereo at the push of a button.
Either way I would say you should probably not believe something that some random guy claims that some other guy on IRC said.
So Microsoft got the rights to manufacture all the parts, thereby avoiding vendor lock-in? How forward-thinking of them. I wonder why they didn't think Massachusetts should do the same...
can limit your ability to get a product to market on time or in sufficient quantity ?
Could someone explain to me why this is news ? I must be a bit slow but I thought it was already common knowledge.
I mean, really, posting that in Slashdot is like posting the blueprints to the White House on the AlQaeda website.
Go ahead, tell me you read phrases like "one manufacturing misstep -- a shortage of graphics chips or a recalled hard drive -- could derail those ambitions and drag Microsoft's unprofitable videogame business even deeper into the red" and didn't start thinking "mmmhh... what can I do to help?".
Are you seriously advocating that they bump up the unit cost of an Xbox to deal with the subset of customers who:
- want to be on the cutting edge of game technology
- dont want surround sound
Not everybody wants to be on the cutting edge of game technology, but where can I get new titles for my original PlayStation console or my Game Boy Color handheld?
People who own an original Xbox console will have to buy an Xbox 360 console or stop buying new titles. In a couple years, if Sony and Nintendo are any indication, Microsoft will likely end-of-life the original Xbox console and stop authorizing new games for it. Therefore, all games for a Microsoft console that are first published after the Xbox has been EOL'd will have to run on the Xbox 360. For people without enough space to put 5 speakers, this creates a position where Xbox games played in stereo (2.0) on an Xbox sound better than Xbox 360 games played in mono (1.0) on an Xbox 360.
the Xbox 360 is probably not what you need to be spending money on.
Once Microsoft stops making or authorizing new games for the original Xbox console, aren't Xbox owners forced to upgrade?
Nice console you got there, be a shame if something happened to it...
"Full rights" to the CPU would mean they could also, for example, modify the design and license others to use their modified design. Suddenly, Microsoft becomes a powerful player in the embedded processor market by selling other people a chip that contains the results of decades of IBM R&D. IBM would, most likely, never let anyone do that, not even Microsoft.
Anyone? IBM originally licensed PowerPC, a single chip implementation of IBM's POWER architecture, to Motorola under terms similar to what you described as "full rights". Years later, Motorola spun off its semiconductor division as Freescale. But you're correct in that Microsoft's license from IBM is probably limited to specific uses pertaining to the Xbox 360 console.
The XBox 360 is a Media Hub, not a Media SERVER. You use your computers and SERVERS to SERVER the media to it
But can anyone make a server for the Xbox 360 client? For example, can it be made to stream DivX media (that is, MPEG-4 Part 2 video and MP3 audio in an AVI wrapper) from a machine on your LAN running Apache HTTP Server?
so,..one potato carefully placed in the exhaust of one delivery van in shanghai and the whole evil empire comes tumbling down..
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea
When you count the number of weeks between final GPU release and launch day... Then take into consideration Microsoft is launching worldwide in a 3-week span... Does it really come as a surprise to anyone that shortages will exist?
Of course not... that would be too silly. The Xbox360 components are so powerful they ought to be able to materialize into consoles and get to store shelves all by themselves.
This has been the claim of every manufacturer since the Nintendo. I'm not buying it. We all know that it is common practice for companies to do 'creative accounting'. We know that there are plenty of ways to make it look like money is being lost when it is not in reality. What do you think would happen if MS admitted to making a 10% profit on their hardware? That's right, they would have hundreds of thousands of people screaming that they should lower the price, or stop charging for a "license" to make software for the unit. The very poor excuse for charging this "license" fee has been that that is how they make their money back from the loss on hardware. They loose even that excuse if they admit to making a profit on hardware.
To keep doing it a few times until they get it right. Once they hit the profit gravy-train then they're groovy. All things considered, they were new to the console market, so it makes sense that they would suffer some lose to begin with - there are costs involve with starting into any market.
...except for the controller. (Which, uh, is "not so good" (tm) )
I still don't understand why most don't like the cube's controller. When I first saw it I thought it was an absolute nightmare, but if you actually *use* the thing it's far superior than the XBox or PS2 controllers.
Most importantly, all the buttons on the cube controller have a distinctive shape. I can't tell you how many times I've had to stop in mid-game on the other consoles to figure out which is the "XO Triangle/Black" whatever. The cube has an X button on the X axis, centered on a large A button, with the B button significantly smaller. Both analog sticks have ridge cutouts on the eight primary directions, making for easy distingushing of analog directions. The triggers are large, and 'click' at maximum pressure. All this tactile feedback is missing on the other console offerings.
Maybe the Dual Shock is more comfortable, I don't think so but many do, but is that enough to overcome Nintendo's no-memorization design?
-- I have fans? Wow.
...which is why XBox games are generally cheaper than their PS2/Cube counterparts!
Wait...
If anything, the XBox has driven game prices up, partly as an attempt to induce the illusion that cost is quality, and partly due to their receding profit margins.
they worry about meeting holiday deadlines... but they cant meet lunch dates?
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
It was a nice try, but it didn't work out. Blame it partially on the game companies for not using it properly, since they had to port to the other platforms too.
"Actually"
"He"
"whether"
"not"
"He"
"prophet"
"Son"
"God"
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