Rings of Red

MS extended the warranty in response to Sony and Nintendo not because they want to keep their customers happy.
If Sony and Nintendo came out a year later I think 360 still has 3 month warranty.

 

You don't know that. Unless you have copies of the memo's, there's plenty of reason to think MS extended their warranty to provide a better customer experience in the event of failures. Whatever Sony and Nintendo do has negligable impact on MS's warranty decisions. They're governed by XB360s failure rates and MS's interests in positive customer relations to build a strong brand identity. Good customer service can be as positive as broken hardware is negative, and customers saying they were fairly treated can help strengthen a brand, even when hardware failing can weaken it.

 

It is obvious. Why didn't they extend the warranty before the PS3 come out with 1 year warranty where their failure rate was alarming since the 2005 launch?

 

Because failure rates had been slowly going down to and reaching an acceptable level around that time?

 

How do you know if it was going up or going down? The failure rate is always alarming. It has never subsided ever since.

If MS was good to customers they should extend the warranty or re-design the hardware few months after launch. They should not look at the competition and respond.

 

What difference does PS3 make? You think the boardroom decided that with the onset of a $200 more expensive machine with limited software, the best way to attract more attention to their console and generate more sales was to extend the warranty?!

 

It makes a whole lot difference in consumer's trust and perception.

For instance:
Nintendo and Sony have 1 year warranty for their products.
MS has 3 months.
360 hardware failure rate is alarming ever since the launch.
So the consumers would think that the 360 is so defective that they don't want to extend the warranty and MS is being incompetent for producing bad products. Customers will turn away and buy a different system.

Of course, MS has a big marketing budget to hire people to defend the defective product.

 

And that is what buggs me. I am sure they know the law to the last little coma, but that is what sucks, that they still will try and cheat you on it because they know that individuals many times will do nothing about it, they will pay up and shut up instead for claiming their rights, going to consumer rights organizations threatne with legal action and what not, since the price of the console does not really warrant such action as many would feel.

I would really really, like to see the calculations their bean counters have done on whether it would cost them more to have good hardware and few returns or bad hardware and many returns. I am sure they came to the conclusion that it would cost them less to have cheap manufacturing and high return rate than the other way around. I just hope they calculated wrong and in the end costs them more than they thought. Didn't they even in one of their reports claimed that due to higher return rate they lost more money than expected or something?...

 

I wan't to congratulate you on a smart decision , Welcome to our lovely country.

 

My 360 died this morning and MS support is completely incompetent. I bought a brand new Core on eBay, and got the extended warranty through them. I got a hard drive later on, nine months ago.

Turns out my 360 HDD is croaked. They can't replace it because as you guessed, the warranty was only for the Core console.

So getting another hard drive + replacing NHL07 which was destroyed by my 360 (circular rings, scratches), about $200 CDN.

This has got to hurt Microsoft at some point. Where's the damn class action lawsuit? I can't believe people who've stuck with this crap for three or four dead consoles, I'm this close to selling all the Xbox stuff and getting a PS3.

 

It's not FUD at all. On one of the forums I go to, almost every single 360 owner has had their 360 die. Towards the end of my 12 month warranty, I started getting very nervous, as I was one of the few remaining owners with zero problems. Took out an extended warranty (for AU$90), and sure enough, ONE MONTH after my warranty would have finished, the console died.

A lot of poor bastards on that forum weren't so lucky, they went out of warranty and had to fork over AU$200 to get their 360s repaired.

I find it pretty astounding that someone is out to defend Microsoft on this issue. Their hardware failure rate is astonishingly high. Even the biggest Microsoft/360 defenders on the board I mentioned earlier found that Rings of Red article to be very fair and well written.

So yeah, please stop harassing people for vocalising their frustration with Microsoft just because you think it's acceptable to have to buy multiple consoles and live with poor reliability. I think you'll find you're very much in the minority there.

 

For all the accusations of the article about very high failure rate, I haven't seen any numbers. The say it's "it's clear that it is a far, far higher proportion than the company originally admitted". If this is a good piece of journalism, why don't they tell us why it's so clear? Why don't they quantify "far, far higher"?

I don't see why some of you are praising this article so much. There's only one hard fact in the entire piece about XBox's reliability: UK customers have to spend GBP 85 to get it fixed after the warranty has expired. Absolutely shocking.

Until we get some real numbers about reliability, we just get the same old discussion again and again.

 

We definitely need some real numbers, but Microsoft won't give them out given how bad they are. Have you seen how cagey they've been lately? They won't even pull out the "they're within industry averages" line.

Yes, it's just anecdotal evidence that people are basing this on, but given the HUGE number of people on the net with broken Xbox 360s (sometimes required 4 or 5 returns to get a working console!) it's pretty obvious something is very, very wrong.

 

Indeed, there can't be too many explanations for the disproportionate number of defective 360 reports compared to the other consoles. The reports are numerous enough to be just anecdotal.

 

Well, the purpose of the 'hugely scientific console reliability' thread was to try and get some information more robust than just forum heresay. With any such numbers it's true to say they're not statistically valid, and by that means they can be discounted. By that same principle, we can say XB360's don't fail any more than any other device, because there's no statistically correct numbers out there. But if you put statistics to one side and use other forms of analysis, the empirical evidence is clear. The true failure rate/MTBF is unknown, but it is high. Journo's are reporting this 'sense' of high failure rate rather than real figures, which we'll not get any time soon, unless some internet site or mag commissions a proper MORI poll.

As for the actual article, it was rather loose journalism IMO. The first half wasn't about the failure rates at all, but marketting and competing with PS3. It was more a summary viewpoint of where XB360 is at and what challenges it faces, rather than a proper investigative piece into failure rates.

 

I'd just like someone to point me to one forum poll where the X360 failure rate came out lower than another console. Just one. If these polls really are so completely off the wall and non-indicative of reality, then they should be all over the map. Some should show whopping high 360 failure rates, while others show that the Wii or the PS3 or the PS2 or something has a much higher failure rate.

 

Great place for sure, but man the language is no joke. I am a bit dissapointed though, I still haven't goten involved in one of the famour Finnish knife fights and I who got myself a nice shiny knife when I moved . Lots of sauna and occasional winter swimming though

On topic: I think this kind of disscussion will be having two sides which are both right, atleast till we get hard evidence. On the one side people saying we have no well supported and statistically correct numbers and most likely what is going on is normal and on the other side people who think that the amount of circumstantial/anecdotal evidence is too much for this to be something ordinary. I hope somehow, someone will do some correctly performed study to see what is going on as I don't expect MS to give any official numbers, especially if the failing xboxes are really high...

 

This just in! An internet poll recently reported that 99.9% of internet polls are bullshit!



old but so true.

 

Perhaps a Sony forum?

I'm not sure my launch unit will be around for another year, but so far so good.

 

If it can survive through one more summer, you probably rolled a lucky box with +1 invincibility