Xbox One back at $349 from tomorrow!

[Adinnieken]

I think they intended to reduce the price all along, however there was a healthy discussion in the boardroom and back offices of Microsoft and the Xbox group about how much. I think the Xbox team argued for keeping it at $350, but corporate management wanted something higher. Possibly $379.00.

Historically if you look at Microsoft price cuts, they come in smaller chunks than $50. Typically they start out with a $20 or $30 price cut. The Xbox team likely wanted to keep the momentum of the sales up through January, and argued for $350, while corporate management was looking at the best price point for profitability and sales.

I doubt this was something they just decided upon yesterday while standing around the water cooler complaining about low sales. I think corporate management is reluctant to do anything that could severely impact profitability, while the Xbox team realizes there are profits to be made through game and services sales. So, a long conversation took place over the holiday with it culminating in a decision sometime after January 3rd, looking at the performance of the Xbox One at the price point offered, and determining, based on previous sales and current sales, which price point offered the best bang for the buck and likely going with the Xbox teams gut feel.

Anyone who has worked in a corporate office environment will understand. Sometimes, simple decisions take a long time because of corporate politics and bureaucracy. It took 3 months for the IT department I worked on to apply a service pack to two different products because some members of management wanted to ensure that our problems would be fixed by installing them. So, we underwent three months of pain, for our help desk team, our technical support team, our retail employees, and consumers, as well as engaging vender consultants on-site to identify and trouble-shoot the cause of our issues only to come to the conclusion that we needed to install those two service packs. There were some hot fixes involved too, but the vast majority of our pain would have been resolved by those two service packs, which I advocated for on the first day and which we were planning to do at that time anyway.

Not only were we frozen for three months from resolving the problem, but our original plans to implement the one of the service packs by my team was put on hold until the vendor consultants determined the problem.

Corporate politics and bureaucracy suck. Especially when it's necessary to have timely decisions made.