| mrstickball said: A question Im starting to contemplate about MS stuffing the supply channel in December: No one has really "figured out" why MS shipped about 2x the amount of consoles it needed, then proceeded to vastly undership (understandably) the next 2 quarters. Could it be that MS knew 65nm process + other discounts were ahead, and that the current line of X360s were faulty, a new real model (falcon sku) was going to be coming, and wanted to drain the channel; to get rid of the faulty line, in one last production swoop? Knowing that the 1b refund would be impending, the thing you'd want to do is get the new models ASAP. Unfortunately, you can't really switch production mid stream, so you need a huge retail backlog of available units, so they can sell. Maybe MS designed the whole overshipping, since this would allow them to re-tool the dies, and re-engieneer the X360 with the Falcon now, and 65nm Xenos in May (as stated by sources). So if this were the case, and MS intentionally overstuffed the channel, so they could get the factories re-tooled quicker, knowing the 65nm + falcon would fix the 1b bear they've created. |
Or MS, well more accurately the managers making decisions with their bonuses on the line, just wanted to make their 10 million bragging milestone. Probably a more accurate guestimation, Occam's Razor and such. Of course that could cause problems later, but I don't think the poor sales they've seen so far this year was part of their plan.
Overall it's not like this is unexpected. Anyone follwing news about the 360 should be aware that stories like this were coming. I doubt these issues will cause any real long term problems for MS. It'll cost money but they have enough so long as the shareholders remain quiescent. It may prevent them from breaking out of the hard core American male gamer rut they are in but it's not like the 360 has much hope of doing that anyways. Hopefully they will learn a good lesson from all this and be a lot smarter next generation if they decide to stay in the console market.
