Microsoft Evasive on 360 Hardware Changes

From all reports Microsoft has upgraded the Xbox 360 consoles coming from their factories, and modified the consoles heading back to consumers from service calls. The trouble is, they're having a hard time admitting it. The company has always maintained there aren't any excessive heat problems with their console, so admitting now that they've added extra heatsink capabilities would be ... somewhat embarrassing. Dean Takahashi at the San Jose Merc has an interview with Todd Holmdahl, the 'hardware guy' at Microsoft: "We're very proud of the box. We think the vast majority of people are having just a great experience. You look at the number of games they are buying, the number of accessories they are buying, the Live attach. They love the box. They continue to buy the box. That said, we take any customer issue very seriously. We continue to look into these things very deeply. You have seen we have made some changes to our customer service policy."

Comments

So What?

[ClosedSource]

If the system has a heating problem don't buy it. MS has no obligation to inform anyone about their hardware design.

Re:So What?

[geekster]

Don't they have an obligation to make that hardware work though?

Re:So What?

[twistedsymphony]

If the system has a heating problem don't buy it. MS has no obligation to inform anyone about their hardware design.

How do you know it has a heating problem until you buy it? Even reports from other consumers are inconsistent and the only "facts" on the return numbers are being produced by MS themselves. How can you expect a consumer to make an educated purchase decision in this situation?

Speaking of "facts on the return numbers" am I the only one who noticed that they went from:
-No problems at all
-Below the Industry standard of 3%
-Below the Industry standard of 5%
and now in TFA -A Majority of the people haven't had problems

despite their overly optimistic spin on the situation... it does get considerably worse everytime the issue is brought up.

I should note that I have a launch day unit and I've never had and problems with it, nor have any of my friends IRL... though I've seen hundreds and hundred of reports of consoles failures on a daily bases on the Xbox-Scene forums where I moderate.

Embarrassing?

[Green Light]

I am not sure why adding a heatsink would be embarrassing. If they find an issue, then they should fix it going forward.

Re:Embarrassing?

[powerlord]

It would be embarrassing because they have vehemently denied there was a problem since the console launched.

Also, admitting that perhaps it has an issue might open themselves up to class action lawsuits (perhaps requiring that the change be made available to every console shipped free of charge), not to mention the bad publicity that would follow.

All and all not something MS wants to contemplate as the Wii and PS3 don't seem to have that problem, and are competing with it at both ends of the market.

RTFA...but whats the actual issue

[svendsen]

I must be missing something. Rev 1 of hardware goes out the door. Some people have issues with it. They have a fix. So when Rev 1 items go in for repair they put the fix in place (whether or not that's the reason it was sent in).

What am I missing here?

Re:We Are Seeing The End Of The Xbox Project

[twistedsymphony]

...It is now just a question of when the plug gets pulled. Does Microsoft want to spend the billions to to keep the 360 artificially alive in the market just to save face or pull the plug now and deal with the short term PR hit and move on to other markets.

Are you kidding? Reports from most financial analysis claim MS has been turning a profit on the Xbox business since last November and plan on getting back into the black after the next holiday.

MS extended the warranty on the Xbox 360 for over a year, they repair these boxes without question or hesitation... if the problem was really THAT widespread one would think it'd be cheaper to do a recall or maybe fix the problems earlier in the consoles life when they could have started producing consoles that didn't come back in for repair.

I find the idea of Ms leaving the console business over this positively absurd given their current market position.

Full disclosure of problems

[Tony]

Nice spin. You dizzy yet?

Actually, all we expect from any company is openness, and not lies. If you are selling a piece of shit, please let us know how bad it smells before we buy it. If you discover you have a problem with your hardware, fess up and do right by the people who spent their money on your stupid fucking product.

I'm not just talking about monopolies who abuse their market position to control the market in ways the government can't even dream about. I want ethical behavior from *all* corporations.

Not that we'll get it. In our current consumerist, corporate culture, ethics are a bother.

The problem:

[lmnfrs]

If MS is being responsive and fixing the issues whats the problem?

The problem is that they aren't admitting there are issues with the Xbox360. They're claiming there are no issues and installing "perfectly normal" hardware updates that, mysteriously, are directly related to these nonexistent issues. They're trying to do just enough to not get sued.

For comparison, there was a bug in an Intel CPU (the Pentium I believe) that rarely occurred and didn't actually cause problems for an average end user when it did. Intel claimed that the problem really wasn't that bad, but eventually consumers got really unhappy and Intel recalled the CPU's.

I think it's okay to admit a problem but claim it's not really a big deal.
Microsoft claims there is no problem, so they can't be responsible for the hardware failures occurring. And maybe they can fix just enough 360's to keep users from banding together and filing a class action lawsuit.