A week ago, I swung by the local EB Games and GameSpot, to see what the prospects were for getting an Xbox 360 for my annual Thanksgiving slack-a-thon.

The nice guy at my local EB Games laughed, stating I would be lucky to get one before Christmas. He said they could cover only 40% of their preorders. The same story was repeated at GameSpot.

Figuring most sales had moved online, I checked out the news over the last week. Story after story told the same tale.

Microsoft has supposedly produced less than 1 million consoles to satiate the 2-3 million gamers eagerly awaiting the new Xbox. The rumor being, this is a deliberate tactic to create a higher sense of value and demand, while avoiding a sales spike, followed by a slump.

If this is NOT an attempt to simply cover their asses for being late to production, it the dumbest thing I have ever seen in the game industry.

Microsoft, whom has lost billions buying second place in the console market, purposely slows the saturation of the Xbox 360?

Can I call bullshit!?

They have might have 4 months before gamers will be within the Nintendo Revolution launch window.

Every day a gamer waits for the XBox 360, between launch and that window, is an opportunity for Nintendo to grab second place back from Microsoft.

Why was Microsoft incapable of producing enough units to saturate the market?

This summer at E3, Microsoft was still not coming clean on backwards compatibility. But they heard from consumers and industry pundits loud and clear, backwards compatibility was all but a requirement.

So, Microsoft probably sent the engineers back to the drawing board to figure out how to wedge some form of compatibility into an already locked down design.

Why would Microsoft have not included backwards compatibility into the 360 design?

The boat loads of cash they lost on the first Xbox.

If they left out compatibility, consumers would have to buy all new games. The icing on the cake, or blades for the costly razor they just built.

Compatibility being a late stage hack makes sense, given the news this week that an important UI element in the 360 is not available when operating in compatibility mode.

At the end of the day, it seems Microsoft is true to their stereotype.

A company incapable of wielding their clout, wealth and technical assets to achieve the mythical dominance of yet another industry.