Something Funny about the Microsoft Shortage Comments

[Reasonable]

MikeB said:
With the resources of a company like Microsoft I am a little sceptical about non-intentional shortages. AFAIK, the other 360 models overall eclipsed the sales of elite models anyhow.

I am also sceptical of a HD DVD equiped Elite rumour as well. All HD DVD drives released so far have been half the speed of the PS3's Blu-Ray drive and a HD DVD drive within the 360 would mean the HD DVD drive must be able to speed up considerably to achieve 12 speed DVD reading speed to not result in long loading times for non-HD DVD stored games, this because the data density is much lower on a DVD than a HD DVD and especially compared to a Blu-Ray disc. One disc rotation equals for less data being read on a DVD disc.

For Europe the 360 seems to be overstocked, at least the pallets at local stores shrink much slower than the PS3 pallets. Also Microsoft doesn't have to allocate many units for Japan. This all makes me sceptical of their excuses.

Their resources don't come into it as they are focused on their main business.

Compared to Sony and others like Samsung MS is really a very small electronics manufacturer and I suspect have minimal influence no matter how much money they could theoretically throw at the problem.  They can't ramp up any quicker than Nintendo say when they had shortages, and in fact are very likely to ramp up slower for the aforementioned reason.

Manufacturing is based on forecasts which are used to drive factories, ordering of parts, etc.  You get the demand wrong and you pay for it as it takes a while to recover.  If you run out of manufacturing then it really takes a while to respond.

Retailers will each forecast for themselves based on consumer sales which drives their ordering, while MS will forecast what it believes retailers will order based on their order history (probably, this is normally how it works). 

The more I look at it the more I think they may just have overcommited to Arcades and stuffed retailers full or Arcades which aren't shipping fast enough, while missing on the other models and getting caught short - I notice from online search that Arcades seem to be readily available while the others are limited.