Dodgeball: XBox 360 Hardware
Witness as Todd Holmdahl, VP of Gaming and XBox Products Group—also known as the 360 hardware guy—clumsily dances around even the simplest of questions regarding the 360 hardware, future updates and the oft-reported Red Rings of Death.
This is getting a little ridiculous. Microsoft keeps calling the problem nothing more than the rumblings of a “vocal minority” but aside from the fact that every single forum, site and blog that I read (which is a lot) has at least one RRoD sufferer if not many, of the dozen or so people I personally know who own 360s, one of them has already had the problem.
Here’s why this is something Microsoft needs to address in a more decisive fashion: As much as I like the XBox 360—and I like it very much—I live in constant fear that it will fail on me. I fear the blazing heat in generates to the extent that though I want it to be (and have already begun setting it up as) the hub of my entertainment set-up, I feel compelled to turn it off every couple of hours and let it cool down. I have an extra one-year replacement plan from the store I bought it from (it was free), and I’m convinced that my unit will fail days or short weeks after that is no longer an option for me.
Microsoft has had a reliability problem for a long time now: It’s perhaps not a literal one, but it is one that exists in the buying public’s perception (remember the Blue Screen of Death? Of course you do). When people talk about the Red Rings of Death, whether it is a pervasive issue or not, it’s so easy for people to identify with (“Yeah, that sounds like Microsoft all right”) that it might as well be. The constant denials aren’t helping and interviews like this… I mean, why even grant the interview?
And as for the interviewer, I want to give Dean Takahashi the benefit of the doubt but what does it take for some journalist to start getting “answers” like this to finally snap and just say, “That’s not an answer to the question I just asked. How about you answer the question, jerk?”