gadgets

Speaking of Consoles...

July 8, 2007 12:13:41.412

My friend Mike brought his Wii over for our party yesterday, and he brought along the new Tiger Woods golf game - which is amazingly good. It's also hilarious - as you play, the announcers get very snarky about your game. Anyway, that success is contrasted by this Wikipedia article that Andres pointed out to me - apparently, Sony isn't the only console vendor with a few issues:

In the early months after the console launch Microsoft claimed in the press that failure rate was in industry average 3-5%. However, the company have not released any official statistics on the failure rate of the console since its launch, and the company's policy is not to do so, instead focusing on a prompt solution of any technical problems arising. Despite Microsoft's reticence, some retailers have reported abnormally high failure rates, with one ex-employee of a retailer estimating the rate to be between 30-33%. FOX News reported 2.5 million consoles broken in the world.

You can follow the link for the citations - there are links to various sources in the original text I've quoted here. I haven't heard about these issues cropping up with the Wii, but Nintendo also didn't reach very far into the "bleeding edge" for their technology.

Update: Boris Popov reports that a lot of companies could go to school on the customer service offered by Microsoft on this. Rather than obfuscation and denial, it looks like they have stepped up and taken ownership of the problems.

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Comments

[Boris Popov] July 8, 2007 13:39:20.348

I just posted a few comments, which I think are important to consider when looking at the big picture.