Did Microsoft Okay Xbox 360 Failures Prior to Launch?
Remember all the media hutzpah over Microsoft's red ring of death? You know, the deathly semicircle of ruby-red light that's your console's way of screeching "I'm melting! I'm melting!" before winking out for good? I've had three, and I repeat three Xbox 360s go waxy witch-works on me. All, to be fair, quickly replaced by Microsoft without so much as waving a press credential. One thing you absolutely have to give Microsoft is that the company (a) acknowledged the problem publicly and (b) did just about everything you could possibly expect of a company to rectify it by extending the warranties and ramping up its mail-back support capabilities. If your 360 croaks, you'll get a transport box and prepaid shipping and even though they say "up to two weeks," generally only be without your console for around one.
I'm therefore not sure this matters, but blog-site 8BitJoystick has an email interview up with a person the site calls "an individual who has worked on the Xbox 360 project for many years." This purported "Microsoft insider" is claiming 30% of Xbox 360 consoles based on the original 'Xenon' (the codename for the initial 360 motherboard) design eventually kick the bucket, and that the problem boils down to competitive carelessness.
This individual accounts for the 360's current problems by claiming "MS was so focused on beating Sony this cycle that the 360 was rushed to market when all indications were that it had serious flaws." What flaws? Insufficient design and quality testing, gaps in test coverage, uncontrolled manufacturing processes, and initial end-to-end yields in the mid-thirties percentile-wise (a number that jibes with retailer claims last July). "Low yields always indicate serious design and manufacturing defects," says the insider, claiming management chose to keep shipping anyway because it desperately wanted the extra year lead on Sony's PS3.
"[Microsoft] tend[s] to make big decisions like that in terms of dollars," continues the insider, claiming the company would rationalize that if the first few million boxes had a high failure rate, a few tens of millions of dollars would cover it. Compare that to the money lost to Sony if MS couldn't get the jump and, say the insider, MS viewed the potential support costs from hardware failures as pocket change.
Not quite pocket change anymore, with the company's July 2007 decision to bump the warranty estimated to cost Microsoft billions.
On the actual cause of the RROD:
The main design flaw was the excessive heat on the GPU warping the mother board around it. This would stress the solder joints on the GPU and any bad joints would then fail in early life.
On some games triggering the RROD:
Certain games will consume more bandwidth on the GPU, which has the most substandard thermal solution on the mother board, making it a lot hotter, warping the mobo and flexing the solder joints. Weak joints fail quickly. The better the game, the more often it will be played, again accelerating failures.
One a return netting a newer (vs. older) Xbox 360:
You send in a broken box, you get back a working box (hopefully). So there is a rotating stock of the original units that get repaired and returned to service. Plus, they keep finding these cashes [sic] of launch units here and there and using them too. Didn't you hear during the holidays that bundles were found with units made in 06? Those were pulled back from the retail channel last spring when the new heatsink was done, and had the new heatsink placed on them and then put into the shipping flow like any other box.
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One user with 11 consecutive failures has been reported in a previous article. Given 17 million users worldwide (Wikipedia), a 22% failure rate would be expected if exactly one such person existed (binomial distribution), so the number seems reasonable.
If the failure rate is 30%, you would expect 1 with 14 failures, 3 with 13 failures, 9 with 12 failures, 31 with 11 failures... and 480,000 people like you with 3 failures. Of course it would take time to accumulate that many failures and many purchasers are recent.
yes i believe this article microsoft has a habit of doing this with all there hardware and software
after all why pay some worker to find out which systems are bad when you can get consumers to do it for free
this is also why i always wait at least 1 year to 18 months after a microsoft product will be released before i will purchase it weather it be a hardware or software
you should see if microsoft will pay you wages for working for them lol
btw i wonder how much it would of cost microsoft to include a 2 or 3 fan cooler with all xboxes? ( it cost us about 20 to 30 bucks for these units but bought in bulk it may have been considerably cheaper
good luck and take care
As a test analyst myself I can tell you that in the development of any product or application there is a pyramidal relationship between 3 things:
Time
Money
Quality
If you cut back on either time or money in the development phase you can be guarenteed that the quality of your product will suffer.
I'm currently on my 2nd 360 after my 1st launch console I got here in the UK bit the dust 2 weeks after its warrenty ranout. Unfortunatley this was the time just before MS offered replacements beyond the warrenty date so was left out of pocket.
With a company as powerful as MS you would have thought they would have had the QA done ont he product before going to market and allowing early adopters, the core of the Xbox failthful to bear the brunt in cost and misery just to make a deadline.
Gladly know I have a 360 which works and enjoy the live experience and all the array of game. I just hope that MS learn next time round to treat us with more respect as loyal customers.