Microsoft Wants To Put The Whole RROD Debacle Behind Them

The dreaded Red Ring of Death which cost Microsoft over a billion dollars to fix and tarnished their image.

But Microsoft is more optimistic and wants to put the past hardware failures behind.

Albert Penello, senior director of global marketing for Xbox 360 has said to IndustryGamers:

“Well, you know it’s unfortunate and, believe me, it’s my least favorite thing to talk about, part of our history,” he said. “I think most people agree it’s become a little bit of an Internet meme now, just a thing to say.

I feel bad for the customers that have had to go through the experiences that they’ve had, but, fundamentally, almost everybody will tell you that consoles purchased in the last two or three years, that problem doesn’t occur. It’s really people that had launch consoles and some of the early hiccups in getting those repaired and back out to people. But really, our focus over the last few years has been continuous improvement and getting the existing boxes rock steady.

The box that you bought a year ago or even two years ago isn’t really having a problem. I mean, when you sell 40 million of something, the hard part is that any part of consumer electronics, automobiles, even DVD players, which are about as commoditized as you can get, the nature of manufacturing means there’s going to be a small handful that have problems.

For the most part, the overall quality problem has been fixed for a couple of years now. This is an evolution of that work. The decision not to put the three red rings in it was just because it’s something I want to put behind us”.

However, a new type of hardware failure dubbed the Red Dot of Death has surfaced although Microsoft is confident their newer Xbox 360 slim model is “a high quality product.”