The history of the epic failure of Xbox 360

Well Dean Taka­hashi wrote a mind-blowing arti­cle about the truth that leads to Xbox 360 hard­ware fail­ure or we called it RRoD (Red Ring of Death). The story is also talk­ing about Chris Szarek’s expe­ri­ence of being Microsoft fan­boy who spent more than $1,000 on his games, but his beloved Xbox 360 is turned out to be failed.

Taka­hashi said :

The qual­ity prob­lem negated much of the advan­tage of going first, and it has delayed the company’s plan to aggres­sively mar­ket the con­sole and slash its prices. (Microsoft dis­putes this point; it cut the price of all three ver­sions of its Xbox con­soles by $50 to $79 on Wednes­day. And the com­pany believes it will sell more boxes than Sony will. But prices ought to be lower still dur­ing this stage of the con­sole life cycle). That has stopped the com­pany from reach­ing the broader mar­ket of con­sumers that Nin­tendo has won over. It has low­ered its ambi­tions, hop­ing instead just to get a clear edge on third-placed Sony. The future prof­its that the com­pany once hoped for are now likely to wind up in Nintendo’s pockets.

Microsoft’s top game exec­u­tive, Rob­bie Bach, pres­i­dent of the Enter­tain­ment & Devices group, said at a din­ner in July that Microsoft’s own research shows that gamers have largely for­given the com­pany for defec­tive Xbox 360s. Microsoft has still sold more Xbox 360 con­soles than Sony to date. But there is no doubt that the com­pany has lost con­sid­er­able good will among gamers. Before Microsoft offered free replace­ments, connsumers grum­bled that they had to turn to forums, such as those on Ars Tech­nica, to vent and to find solu­tions to prob­lems that the com­pany didn’t openly dis­cuss. And for a cou­ple of months now, Sony’s PlaySta­tion 3 has been out­selling the Xbox 360 in the U.S. for the first time.

I asked Microsoft to con­firm or deny 35 dif­fer­ent facts con­tained in this story. Instead, I received a for­mal state­ment from a Microsoft spokesper­son, say­ing the com­pany had already acknowl­edged an “unac­cept­able num­ber of repairs” to Xbox 360 con­soles and responded to the hard­ware fail­ures with a free replace­ment pro­gram. The state­ment also said, “This topic has already been cov­ered exten­sively in the media. This new story repeats old infor­ma­tion, and con­tains rumors and innu­endo from anony­mous sources, attempt­ing to cre­ate a new sen­sa­tional angle, and is highly irresponsible.”

On Giz­modo site, the author said:

In an Aug. 30, 2005 memo, the team reported over­heat­ing graph­ics chip, crack­ing heat sinks, cos­metic issues with the hard disk drive and the front of the box, under-performing graph­ics mem­ory chips from Infi­neon (now Qimonda), a prob­lem with the DVD drive, and other things.

To be hon­est, the first rea­son I hates 360 is because of RRoD even it just got fixed on newer unit or MS gimme free repair on hard­ware fail­ure. It’s made me not to trust MS and that damn xbox 360. In short word, I rather like PS3 than 360, at least there’s less than 1 per­cent for the hard­ware to fail. I don’t want to pay $299 and wait­ing ’til it’s fixed or pay fee for a replacement.

Any­way, I don’t mean I want you all to hates MS and buy Wii or PS3 instead. You have right to choose it… err, well any­thing have pros/cons on itself. You might want Xbox 360 because it’s cheap and save your bud­get. But my guess is if you pay more a bit, you won’t have shed the tears.

What do you think of this story? Would you con­sider to get other con­sole instead of 360?
Source: Ventuer­Beat via Giz­modo

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