MS sued over 360 failures

[boffo]

Microsoft sued for concealing Xbox 360 failure rate News - PC Advisor

Microsoft is being sued by a US woman who claims the company concealed the high failure rate of the Xbox 360 console.

Reshelle Cable claims the microsoft violated multiple state consumer-protection and unfair-competition laws. Cable alleged that the company continued to sell the Xbox 360 even though it knew that the console's hardware was likely to fail.
According to Cable, Microsoft pushed the Xbox 360 to market in the hope of trumping machines from rivals Sony and Nintendo even thoughit was aware of problems. "[The Xbox 360's] rush to the market was detrimental to consumers because [it] suffered from numerous hardware defects," reads the lawsuit.
The Xbox 360's hardware problems - dubbed the 'red ring of death' for the flashing red lights that signal a general failure of the machine - have dogged Microsoft since the game system's first year. In July 2007, Microsoft finally acknowledged that an "unacceptable number of repairs" had to be authorised on returned units, and said that it was taking a $1bn (£587m) charge against earnings to pay for the fixes.
At the time, Microsoft also extended the Xbox 360's warranty to three years for any Xbox 360 that displayed the error signal.
The lawsuit asks that Microsoft be required to hand over profit it made by deceiving consumers and that Xbox 360 owners be refunded their money. The case sought class-action status so that other Californians could participate.
The lawsuit was filed by Keith Cable, also of Folsom. It is not known whether Reshelle Cable and Keith Cable are related. The latter did not immediately return a call for comment.
Microsoft was also not available for comment.

Another lawsuit that seems to be coming well after the fact and that MS will keep it from going anywhere, but this is one that I'm surprised we hadn't seen already.

[E6600]

Owned!

[Ark]

you could kinda tell something like that was gonna happen...

[codenamelenny]

I don't think it will go anywhere. If they didn't fix them for free then it would.

[boffo]

Originally Posted by codenamelenny

I don't think it will go anywhere. If they didn't fix them for free then it would.

Problem is "fixing" them for free didn't really fix the problem. I've seen many people who claim to have had their 360 replaced multiple times because the refurb they get back also rings on them. Those people almost have a valid case here.

[NintendoMaster]

Luckily, I've never had a single problem with my Xbox 360 that I bought last December. It was new, by the way, I would never buy used consoles.

[AkaneJones]

These type of lawsuit always come later. Even if this one isn't technically frivolous, like the Wii uses two analog sticks, I threw my Wiimote at my TV, the N64 analog stick gave me a thumb callous, etcetera etcetera, its chances of making any impact are slim. MS still has money to burn, but there's no chance of the monopoly suit sized amount of money being sloughed off here. So really even if they win(won?) it's not going to impact much.

This whole thing does make you wonder though. That if MS hadn't been forced to rushed the 360, would there be more good third party Wii game and would Sony not have crashed so hard the way they did. I can speculate that PS3 might not have been as powerful as the need to graphically compete would have been unknown. I mean the validity of producing a Xbox 360 that was that powerful for the trade off in reliability is both negligent and underhanded, if anyone knew. MS tried to win the war by stealing both early launch and and best technology. It ultimately bit them in the butts, what with both initial losses and repair plus shipping costs. Still it could have worked, they just didn't know about Nintendo's Wii in their pants.

Mind you Sony was playing dirty too what with Bluray. But at that time it didn't mean so much. Actually I say Nintendo should buy HD-DVD's encoding and use that for the HD-Wii disks, had better read speed and similar storage. The bonuses are no Sony royalties, and limited piracy. Although that assumes disk based formate is still the way to go by then.

[domokunrox]

Originally Posted by AkaneJones

Mind you Sony was playing dirty too what with Bluray. But at that time it didn't mean so much. Actually I say Nintendo should buy HD-DVD's encoding and use that for the HD-Wii disks, had better read speed and similar storage. The bonuses are no Sony royalties, and limited piracy. Although that assumes disk based formate is still the way to go by then.

Its a nice idea, but thats not going to happen.

1. What do you mean Sony playing dirty with Blu Ray?
2. Nintendo isn't going to buy a dead format that doesn't have replication factories in existence anymore. No Wii developers are complaining about disc space, either. The complaint is lack of downloadable content because of no standard HDD.
3. Nintendo would not benefit from Sony going away. They would suffer actually.
4. DD won't be viable, yet. Japan is far ahead of NA in terms of having all the backbone for it, and even they aren't ready and won't be for quite some time. It'll take about 8-10 years until disks are a thing of past. Maybe more.