Are they even testing this stuff?

First they can’t produce enough units for sales in the States or Europe, but over supply Japan.

Now they release patches that break fundamental features of the console.

Microsoft released a couple patches for the Xbox 360 over the past few days, the latest of which has a massive install bug, rendering backwards compatiblity broken on a bunch of systems, including yours truly’s.

Read more at Russell’s site.

The real issues lurking under the surface may be a double shot.

In their mad rush to beat the stalwarts of the industry to market, Microsoft shipped a slightly buggy product, relying too heavily on patching the product in the field.

In my experience with consoles, Sega, Nintendo and even Atari, I don’t remember a console that was patched after launch. The beauty and appeal of game consoles. It is supposed to be a pristine platform that “just works” for both users and developers.

Microsoft may have failed to learn from Apple’s very public lesson regarding IBM’s inability to deliver PPC chips in both quantity and quality.

IBM is supposed to deliver a 64-bit chip utilizes a whopping three processor cores, each of which runs at 3.2 GHz for each XBox 360.

If IBM couldn’t produce chips at significantly lower speeds for Apple’s computer business, why would anyone believe that IBM can produce enough of these monster chips for a mass consumer product like the XBox?

I am just speculating, but with no XBox 360s on store shelves less than 2 weeks before Christmas, does any analyst really believe this is a planned shortage?