With the 3 year warranty and a console revision on the way, I think Microsoft has made the major change necessary.

Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo each have their own set of limitations and problems and should be focusing on their own issues than the issues of other console manufacturers ...

I see MS being in trouble. Their hardware problems are already vaguely known to people who are buying video games, even if it's just for their grandkids. Case in point, yesterday at Gamestop here, a grandfather was asking the clerk about the problems with 360 due to the clerk attempting to push the system on the old man.

The general gaming consumer might put up with faulty hardware and the like, but the average person won't.

Would it make you feel better that when you buy a lemon car you have a good three year warranty for it? Everything would be paid for, and you don't even have to be reimbursed anymore. Would that make it all better when you know, the car will fail at some point, perhaps even repeatedly, and you will be forced to perhaps walk to a gas station, be stuck on the side of the road waiting for it to be towed, waiting for it to be fixed, having to strategize around not having a car for awhile, be late for work or other important aspects of your life, etc. etc.

I know that gamers will endure such pains for their favorite hobby, but anyone who thinks a new comer is going to take such hoopla with stride is fooling themselves.

I think MS has had a great chance at really destroying Sony this round. Something that was not really thought too possible, albeit a lot of this has to do with Sony's own fumbling time and time again. Problem is, even when MS has the ball and the open field is in front of them, the red lights of death will stop them in their tracks.

I read that MS had just announced that EVERY 360 can fail at ANY point.I told one of my friends about the Red Ring of Death but he dissmissed it as a rumour and got a 360 anyway.I can't believe that after 33% failure rate MS half addressing the issue and having alot of opportunities still they havent told the whole public of everywhere that they can fail.They could tell them over the news,newspapers,internet or anyway but they are trying to save face infront of the gaming comunity and soon it will kick them down and pin them until they either 1.Revamp the hard ware and RECALL the "10million" sold and fix them all or 2.Leave it and not see it has a real problem and let Sony slowly eat away at their market share and let Nintendo completly kick them out of the console war.
Until they fix this issue sales won't go as high as they want them to i.e when Halo3 is released sales will go up but if they didnt have faulty units they would go up alot higher passing even the Wii.
the 360 has RPG's but not good ones that will start series(maybe Fable) and they are all western RPG's no Japanese RPG's well a few but not enough to get the Japanese to buy the Halobox.If the 360 got a game like FF or Zelda then maybe it will come 1st but without addressing the fans of those(me being one of them) they won't win because thats like every Japanese person and anyone who has ever played FF or Zelda.

MS is paying attention. Right now, they're focusing on the games they have coming out NOW. They don't have to get people excited about what is coming out in 2008 and beyond, they have the goods to deliver in the next 5 months.

There is plenty of time for them to advertise what is coming out in a year or later. But right now, 360 gamers are too eagerly anticipating Bioshock, H3, GTA IV, Blue Dragon, Mass Effect, Lost Odyssey, Assassin's Creed, Eternal Sonata, and others to worry about how much they should be drooling over Killzone, which won't come out until Q1 2008 AT THE EARLIEST.

In short, MS has the goods to deliver now. Nintendo has the hardware that people crave right now. Sony is the one who has to entice people into believing that in the future, their console will deliver games that make Xanadu come back to Earth and deliver them from Evil.

In the meantime, the Big N and MS are enjoying what will be a very prosperous holiday for both of them.

Not every 360 will fail. The majority of people are still using their launch units nearly 2 years after they bought them and they work fine. There is a problem; MS addressed it with a 3 year warranty. You can't ask much more than that out of a company short of a complete recall and that will never happen.

And your comment about 360 RPGs are idiotic at best. Let's see... Sakaguchi isn't a prominent figure in JRPGs... Nope, not at all. Bioware isn't the best western console RPG maker around... Nope, not at all. Bethesda, last year, didn't spearhead their latest RPG on the 360... Nope, not at all.

Seriously, if you're a console gamer and love RPGs, there's no place better than the 360 right now. And given Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey in the next 4 months, it's only going to get better. I don't see any of the other consoles surpassing the 360 in RPGs until late 2009 at the earliest and even then the 360 will have a new batch arriving. 

The 360 will for the mean time remain in my eyes until these are realeased a console for FPS if all these JRPG's cant get the Japanese interested in the 360 then there really isnt any point for MS to keep releasing these JRPG's except to the JRPG fans in the west.MS is just trying to reach an audience they should have had games for at the launch and didnt they are just covering their tracks and if these games are going to be as good as they say they will then maybe MS has addresed the point but if they get these JPRG's wrong then they wont get the Japanese audience back. Bioware yes amazing RPG maker.

MS will keep paying JRPG makers because their games do sell in the west, even if the 360 doesn't sell in Japan.

And given the Famitsu rankings on Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata (and the demos I've played for both), they're fabulous games. MS has nothing to worry about other than the fact that the Japanese hate American products.

The phrase "is hard to program for" is actually fairly accurate. I have not programmed on a PS3 SDK, but I have done multi-threaded and multi-processor programming. Which is essentially what the PS3 is with the cell and its multiple processors.

Basically the difficulty boils down to a juggling act of sorts, usually a clear vision of how the program is to be written helps, but it isn't always available with every PM. Basically, it is an absolute fact that the PS3 is harder to program for than the 360 or Wii. However it is not much of an excuse for poor design and performance.

These guys are professional programmers working on the most popular programming jobs around and they have no reason to not have real world practical work and experience with these kinds of architectures. Quite simply, they are supposed to be good at what they do, and it isn't exactly a mind-bender of a puzzle until you are trying to squeeze the last drops of performance, but by then most people are satisfied with how a game turns out (cause if you are squeezing all you can get out of a system and it still runs like crap you are writing software ahead of the hardware).

Only if you ignore the fact that MS gives excellent tools to program for a simple tri-core chip while Sony gives weak tools to program for a hybrid multi-core/satellite chip system, it seems hard to program for one over the other.

While it is hard to program for multi-core chips, at least MS has consistent cores in their system and provides very good tools to work with (just read a few dev interviews about it) while Sony is going with a completely untested server chip as their main processor. Ever wonder why the PS3 folds so well? That's what it was manufactured to do.