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Microsoft Warranty Fallout (not the good kind)
By George Walker | July 8, 2007
Yeah, sorry about using the word “fallout” in my title. This doesn’t have anything to do with the classically awesome game series, but about how Microsoft’s failure has been… classically awesome.
MSFTExtremeMakeover is a blogger who works at Microsoft (somewhere) that has been anonymously criticizing Microsoft along with a small cadre of anonymous internal critics that have blogged on everything from rancid stock performance to retarded HR policies.
Well, anyway, MSFTExtremeMakeover posted a hilariously tragic rundown of the $1,000,000,000 warranty price tag from a Microsoft employee’s perspective.
My favorite part is where he quotes Todd Holmdahl, the now-infamous stonewaller that was interviewed by Dean Takahashi, from 3 weeks ago:
I would go back and say the vast majority of people love their experience. We continue to go back and address all of these issues on a case by case basis. There is a vocal minority out there. We go off and try to address their issues as quickly and as pain free as possible.
Then, fast forward to just a few days ago:
“It’s a meaningful number and it’s got our attention,” Bach said. “When you look at the financial implication, obviously it’s not a small number.”
Ouch… Well, and that’s what’s got everyone (including myself) so ticked off. Microsoft spent so much energy ignoring, denying, spinning what the community has been saying for months: the sh*t’s broken! It’s great that you yayhoos FINALLY got around to admitting that there has been a systematic design problem with the 360. (Wow, I hope the 360 Elite doesn’t have the same design issue.) Is it any wonder that the 360 has also missed it’s most recent sales target of 12 million units?
Now comes the interesting part where Microsoft shifts people around to different teams and sends the unlucky scapegoats off into Microsoft Office la-la-land. Problem is, that the real issue isn’t that there was a design flaw. These things happen, especially with electronics. What makes the mistake into a full-blown failure is when you strive to cover it up, pretend like nothing is happening, and then after months and months of ignoring the issue, then you finally decide to do something about it, only after it becomes obvious that it’s hurting your bottom line. See, if you were smart, Microsoft, you would’ve realized a LONG time ago that it could’ve been addressed for much cheaper than $1 billion if you had done so a YEAR AGO.
That’s what you get for trying to screw over your customers. Thanks for playing.
By the way, if I were Dean Takahashi, I would’ve been a lot more smug.
Topics: Microsoft |
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Comment by Richard (Aeropause) — July 9, 2007 @ 11:53 am
Even though I do think that MS should have come forwrd a bit sooner I imagine that they had a lot of options to think about in order to fix these issues. We still have no idea how many 360s were breaking…plus you should never read anything from someone who works at MS. People who bitch about their jobs should never be taken seriously!
Comment by Stephen — July 9, 2007 @ 10:33 pm
Does anyone know if the Elite has been more reliable than the other 360 models?
Comment by kyldere — July 10, 2007 @ 12:30 pm
The last time I saw “Fallout” and “Microsoft” together in the same line was the remarkably bad Brotherhood of Steel title (affectionately known by fans as PoS). I wonder at the coincidence.