Microsoft is tooting its horn today about recent sales reports for Xbox 360. In the US it’s in first place among the current crop of consoles including Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3. If exaggerated failure rate estimates hold true - that’s only 3 million red circles of death!

Nintendo Wii is still the winner in worldwide sales. That little console that could keeps chugging along selling 25.8 million internationally according to VGChartz.com. The same figures say Xbox 360 has sold 18.9 million and PS3 sold only 12.6 million.

Unfortunately for Microsoft the Xbox 360 has been suffering from an abnormally high failure rate. The failure is affectionately known as the red circle of death for the red ring that appears around the power button when it has suffered damage and needs to be serviced by Microsoft.

Failure rates were once rumored to be as high as 30% - a bit that emerged from the Internet, so it must be true. At 10 million that means Microsoft has serviced 3 million bad consoles. Peter Moore, former VP of Interactive Entertainment of Microsoft famously claimed it was only 3%, which is probably another exaggeration. A third party called Square Trade, a warranty seller, conducted a survey with a sample size of over a thousand Xbox 360s. It came to the conclusion that failure rates looked a lot like 16.4%.

Failure rates that high are costly for Microsoft! Whatever shortcuts it took at the engineering, production and quality assurance stage came back to bite them in a big way. It just goes to show that haste makes waste.

Tags: Cell Phones

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 8:50 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.