So you think that GI faked the numbers and that Squaretrade is now MORE reliable when they say that failure rates have dropped?

Bearing that in mind who would you think is more reliable?

I would say Squaretrade is just as reliable as GI.

A poll of an unknown portion of gamers has just about the same significance as an unknown portion of customers seeking repairs from one company. I would say neither are reliable for this discussion, but that they are reliable in that they are being honest about their results.
It's just that neither one has any numbers that mean anything.

I just think there is more validity from a company that takes warranties from people purchasing consoles as opposed to a magazine that polls completely random people. How was it done? Did they ask people on the street? I doubt they put much money or effort into it.

You really think a phone poll is as accurate as an engineering repairs facilities failure report...ROFLMAO...nothing else needs to be said.

Nobody saw the flaw in this study???

Of course nobody is sending RROD into third party warranty....

Is it because an "improvement" in quality.... or that Microsoft started offering 3 years RROD warranty and people decided to send it directly to Microsoft instead???

WOW...really...uhhmmm...M$ instituted the 3-year replacement plan in July 2007...and it's now 2009...so wouldn't the steep drop have occured in late 2007, and early 2008 at the very earliest?  So...what..people just started figuring out the M$ warranty program this year?  Also, this report addresses this fact by stating that based on their exchanges with their customers...the failure rate might be as high as 35%.  Also...alot of people are taking the time to READ the report, before saying stuff on this thread.

although I always expect you to have some important information to contribute to the arguments, the fact of the matter is that niether can be taken by themselves.

Polling is part of nearly every statistical research, and polls have been proven to be exceptionally accurate. However, they are never good indicators of anything without additional information, and can even be used incorrectly to prove things that aren't true.

Of course, one warranty company's failure report in no better. I don't think that they are reporting incorrectly, but as any good researcher knows, you can't always take the word of a person who has something invested in the stats. The other thing every good researcher knows, is that every graph and statistic must be taken along with all additional information. Here we have no other information. We don't know how long these warranties last, we don't know what types of errors were reported, we don't know if this is an internal or external report. We don't know anything, and for you to say definitively and with excessive verve, that one company is more reliable than another, using evidence that I've shown to be exceedingly unsupported on both sides, is ignorant.

To really drive home my point, these two examples make a better case when used together, than when used separately.

On the other hand, lots of professionally used statistics use nothing but phone polling. In fact, VGC uses a type of polling to find it's numbers. There are no professionally used statistics though, that gather information from only one company. Especially not one that has vested interest in the service, and is only one of the companies involved. THat's like reporting a president as having won an election when only polling people from one state.

Now what we could do, if we had an approximate number of cases for both sources, we could find a measure of reliability through statistics and find some discrepancies as well as some similarities. But like I said, we are only getting a piece of the information from each.