When my internet goes down for an extended period I call the company and they give me my money back for that period of time.

Having almost 2/3 of your userbase at some point connected to the internet is an interesting if mostly meaningless stat. I think it was announced since it's a good PR milestone to tout and that the 10 million is basically the viable userbase for something like an XBLA game or extra DLC rather than the 16 million of actual hard systems out there.

How is it meaningless?  If your MS trying to pursuade companys to put their movies or tv shows on xbox live wouln't they want to know how many users could potentially purchase their product?  How about if your looking to create downloadable content for a game?  Why do you think vgchartz wants to grow and expand the user base?  The more people in a service or site or what ever it means more exposure.  You think youtube or facebook etc where bought because they where cool?  The more users the more likely for shit to happen.  The actual hard systems is nice but what about the extra money to be made in xbla, extra dlc and video marketplace which don't need gold per say.  I just don't see how this number is meaningless unless you want to elaborate further.

Where I work we can only guarantee 99.9% uptime on our servers. That 1% is basically since "shit happens".

My Comcast goes down quite often for 10-15 minutes at a time, and whatever, I deal with it.

Im sure a call to Comcast (or MS) would get you some kind of consolation for downtime if you want it bad enough.

We are all on the internet arent we? Im sure you internet provider doesnt have a sparkling clear record. If it goes down, is it unacceptable? Do you call up and cancel right away?

On the other hand yes, I do have a tolerance and if a service is down *enough* it will be unacceptable to me. At that point Id cancel. I dont just shrug off everything with a "shit happens" attitude. But Im just getting the vibe from some people that in order for a paid service to be acceptable it has to be perfect. I dont think thats realistic. 

As for XBL, except for the hiccup this last holiday (and maybe the Halo initial overload), it has been more than acceptable to me, and has provided more than the $50/year worth of good times.

Hey I used to have Comcast go down for 10-15 minutes and all they did was come over about 5 times to get it fixed and they finally did. Of course after the third time I really did try to switch but had no real alternative where I live :(.

I don't care about the downtime. It's really not that bad. My problem is that I'm paying for a service that's signifficantly less advanced and versatile than Steam which I get for free on my PC. Oh, and Games for Windows can go to ****ing hell.