Xbox 360 chief rings the changes after failures

Neil Thompson has just one word to describe what it felt like when he first experienced the Xbox 360's so-called red ring of death (RROD): "disappointing".

Microsoft has refused to discuss the gory details of what went wrong, and Thompson himself is fuzzy when it comes down to defining the problem. "There is a certain percentage - not a massive percentage - of consoles that were experiencing disk failures or CPU failures, or whatever word we want to use," he explains.
"My personal understanding of the precise technology isn't sufficient," he says. "But I do know that we've isolated certain elements that, for certain products that were produced, made them fail."
"The first thing to say is I'm sorry that you've had a bad product experience, and hopefully we're doing what we can to solve that. The bottom line is that you want a product that is reliable."
"It's obviously reinforced the fact that quality is paramount. It was something that we understood before, but it's become an intense focus. It's something you can't slip below - you have to maintain a quality bar."

A $1bn cockup would be a salutary lesson for any company, but the Xbox's problems haven't stopped there. At the peak of the vital Christmas season, the Live service (used by millions of Xbox owners to play online) ground to a halt. Just when thousands of punters were ready to swarm onto the net, darkness descended.
"Incredible success brings some operational issues that mean we haven't scaled in the way we should have. As we said at the time, we apologise for that. It isn't the way we want to do business."
"When you look at the scale of what we're running, I think we are actually quite good at it - we've got millions and millions and millions of people playing online across the world every day. It's not an insubstantial task to keep that going. Now that's not an excuse, that just context ... but we are breaking new ground with this - unfortunately, at Christmas, we failed the test."

The online efforts of Sony and Nintendo might remain fairly basic, but they are improving all the time. However, the suggestion that Xbox Live could become completely free is met with a shake of the head. "What we offer is the deepest, most involving service of anyone, and I think the fees we charge are appropriate," he says. "Would I want to pay for the service my competitors offer? No, because they're not offering anything near what we do."

But underneath the corporate, maybe there's an easier way to gauge Microsoft's response to all this tumult. Just last month Xbox prices were slashed, with the most common package dropping significantly by £50 to £199. Perhaps actions really do speak louder than words.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...rosoft.xbox360