Gearheads of War

Perusing the web I came across about as concrete a statement about 360 failures as we will get:

From http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2007/07/29/vista_xbox_saas_its_all_in_the_fam.html.

"
Robbie Bach covered the Xbox, Zune, Windows Mobile, Mediaroom etc, and commented on the Xbox problem. He said:

    Since somebody will ask in the audience, I'll just answer the question, you know, "Tell me about the specific component that failed that caused you to have to do the warranty reserve." And I will tell you that it would have been easier for me from a questioning perspective to tell you that it was a specific component, but it's not. It's a design challenge that we've had to work around and create a new design to solve that problem, and for the interaction of a variety of different components. And so that's a Microsoft design question, not some component manufacturer's problem or our manufacturing partner's problems. It's something we've had to work on. We know we have a much better design in the market now. We verified that. We feel very good about the quality going forward, and we think we're going to be able to deliver on our goals for the year.
"

I think it's comforting to hear that straight talk, although the 3 year warranty extensions was the perfect example of putting your money where your mouth is for Microsoft.