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For Unlucky 360 Owner Seventh Time's the Charm
Microsoft has maintained that the problems occasionally reported by Xbox 360 owners are not very prevalent; just a small percentage of 360s are faulty, they say. That may be so, but for one unlucky console owner it's taken seven faulty consoles for him to get customer service satisfaction. The Mercury News discusses the tale of Rob Cassingham, a self professed 'Xbox fanboy'. He and his wife Mindy run a gaming center, and were responsible (via direct purchases and through word of mouth) for more than a dozen 360 purchases. For his business, he had six machines ... and every one of them failed. Even one of the replacements for the original unit failed, and for every replacement he's had to wait two weeks to get a new system. As he puts it, "Why spend money for rims on a car that spends 90 percent of its time in the shop?" After the Merc's Dean Takahashi referred his case to Peter Moore, he finally received a new machine as a replacement for his most recent faulty model. Cassingham is still deciding whether to keep it or not.
Microsoft wasted billions with the idiotic notion that cramming commodity x86 pc parts into a big ugly black box on the first Xbox. And now with their second effort in the console market they have managed to put out the worst console ever made. Go to any console forum on the net and there are still, still!, a year and a half after the console has been on the market 360s dropping dead.
Just a quick look at last quarter's results for Microsoft show the Xbox's division is still bleeding cash at a sickening rate. I read somewhere that the 'profits' from the 360 were going to help Microsoft subsidize the price of the Zune and undercut Apple's iPod line. So much for that plan.
I've seen other 360 owners do more damage to the Xbox brand than any other console maker with the constant and desperately fanatical attempt to silence the huge numbers of 360 owners whose machines have died. The last thing someone who is looking at 400 dollar brick connected to their TV is a bunch of lunatic fanboys calling you an idiot.
The 360 is selling worse in Japan and Europe and almost as well in the US. After six years in the console market and nothing to show for the billions wasted you have to wonder if Microsoft is still trying just to save face and avoiding publicly admitting defeat. Microsoft needs to focus on Vista gaming. Windows gaming is where the vast majority of Xbox developers would rather be doing their games on. Drop the hardware Microsoft, it's clearly not an area you any competence in. Move Xbox developers over to Vista exclusives, bring the useful parts of the online service over and leave the yearly charge behind. Let Nintendo and Sony battle each over console players and let pc gamers play games on their platform of choice, the pc.