It was just a matter of time: Last night my XBox 360 flashed the Three Red Rings of Death. The good news is that Microsoft is paying for the shipping. The bad news is twofold: I was on the hook for $25 in packaging costs, and I’m going to wait a few weeks to get it back.
Hey Microsoft: Not cool. You used to send out packaging for people to send back their defective XBoxes. Why did you stop? Did you stop because you did such a poor job of testing it that you lost tons and tons of money, and just got stingy about taking responsibility for your poor standards? I bet that’s it.
Unfortunately, this is the era in which we live. Hardware is rushed to market in order to establish dominance (and, yes, for Microsoft it paid off in this generation of console wars), but the consumer really suffers in the end. It was like that with the BlackBerry Storm – it was so buggy as to be nearly unusable, and early-adopters had to wait for a software update. RIM knew the problems, but put it out anyway. If you listen to sources at Microsoft, they knew what they were doing, too: On one of their test runs, 68 of every 100 units were defective.
It’s sort of ridiculous that this is somehow OK. It’s why, even after they put out the iPhone 3G, I waited for a couple of months to pick one up. I’d rather wait for the first wave of people who pick it up and discover all the hardware and software failures, so they can be fixed. I’m sorry they’re the ones who have to do that, as opposed to the manufacturer, because product testing is not our job.
