Ahh,Microsoft and they're hardware problems,seems like only yesterday that they were denying that there even were hardware problems.Of course we all knew there were.Now almost two years and God knows how many broke 360's later,Microsoft is asking us to "not look at the fact that the machine broke,but rather look at how Microsoft is handling repairs".
Sure Peter,let me get right on that.
As most people already know,Bungie has had some issues today getting the Halo3 Beta via Crackdown to work.So I was waiting on my friend Matt to get the beta downloaded so we could party up.Then I get a message from him saying his 360 broke!The same 360 that he bought less than a week ago!Right when the beta is starting his brand new Xbox360 craps out on him.You can imagine that he was rather unhappy.
I bought my first 360 back in late 2005 when it launched ,it broke less than a year later.I called Microsoft and they said they would fix it and take care of all the shipping and packaging to boot.So naturally I was pretty stoked that getting it fixed was so easy.Well,they didn't fix anything,they simply replaced it with a unit that was actually older than my original.Other than the fact that all the stuff I had downloaded from live up to the point that it broke wouldn't work,I was ok with it.That is until that one broke too.The worse part is that when I called Microft this time I was informed that the warranty on my old 360 carried over onto the replacement and since it had expired, I would have to pay to have this fixed.Pay to have a replacement fixed that was sent to me unbeknownst of the fact that I wasn't getting my original one back in a repaired state.
Something just didn't seem right about that.So I called Microsoft several times to try to get them to own up and pay for the repair,but it wasn't happening.The people that you speak with when you call these overseas call centers either:
a.probably do not even work for Microsoft and therefore do not care about your problem.
b.Have certain,very limited,procedures that they are given to go by when you call and therefore are useless when presented with a problem that requires the solving of a real unique problem.
c.are located half way around the world and therefore don't usually speak english well enough for us to make any significant amount of progress.
Microsoft is maintaining that the 360 only has a 3% failure rate.But from what I've personally experienced and the things I've read on the internet,3% seems more representative of the amonut of 360's that do not fail.The head of Microsoft Game Studios,Shane Kim,was recently quoted as saying,"I've spent some time with the Linden Lab guys [developers of Second Life]. To try to build Second Life on Xbox Live--or YouTube, Facebook, any of those big social networking services and sites--it's a lot of work. It's all software, and we're the software company in this market here", in regards to Sony's upcoming "Home" online service.Well,he must be right because judging by how often 360's break,they damn sure aren't the hardware company in this "market here".
No comments:
Post a Comment