Prisoners Youth in China is manufacturing
Microsoft hardware for as little as 52 cents per hour

Summary: Xbox 360 consoles continue to fail, Xbox Live for the original Xbox shuts down, and Microsoft sends jobs to China and India to reduce expenses (Xbox is made under prison-like conditions in China)

MICROSOFT'S Xbox and Xbox 360 are poor-quality products that continue to disappoint. Based on this new survey, almost half of Xbox 360 owners continue to experience failure/s. Here is what we learn from GameSpy:

It's a sight Xbox 360 gamers dread: the power button glowing with three red rings. According to the largest survey of its kind, we now know how prevalent the RROD and other hardware problems are: 42% of all 360 owners have had their consoles repaired or replaced.

Microsoft has also just messed up the Gears Of War 3 launch, which it was planning to hype up using old and dishonest tricks. As ITWire puts it:

We all knew it was coming, and we all knew that a clarification announcement was imminent, but a slip on the Xbox 360 dashboard by Microsoft’s PR department has let the Gears of War 3 cat out of the bag.

As we mentioned the other day, Xbox Live is dead for many users (this post also refers to Microsoft's exploitative practices in China) and this is now confirmed [1, 2]. Those two subjects are connected to one another because of the gruesome sweatshops where all Xbox 360s are typically manufactured. Low-cost production breeds low-quality products and Xbox 360 is one such product (there are many more).

“The legal team too -- not just operations -- is being shipped to India.”Speaking of offshoring, the other day we wrote about Microsoft's new deal with Infosys, which acts like a Microsoft department in India [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]. One of our sources from India confirmed this allegation earlier today by saying that Infosys "has lot of mutual understanding with Microsoft"; Infosys is notorious among Free software proponents in India. Here are some more articles about that deal which was mentioned the other day [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. This contract gabbed a lot of mainstream media attention, so a heaps of publications did not pay attention to yet more offshoring, courtesy of Microsoft in India. The legal team too -- not just operations -- is being shipped to India. Based on this new article from Law.com, "Microsoft Signs Outsourcing Deal With Integreon," which will handle the legal work in India after Microsoft fired a lot of its legal workforce in the West [1, 2].

Microsoft Corporation has signed a new deal with Integreon that will see the legal process outsourcing (LPO) company carry out further legal support services for the software giant.

The new agreement, which confirms Integreon as Microsoft's exclusive provider of offshore managed document review, will see a team of lawyers in India provide contract review and offshore document review for Microsoft.

Microsoft is trying to save money. It tries to pay employees as little as it can get away with. If the quality of products from Microsoft declines, people ought to know why. Prison-esque conditions like those exposed in China do not accommodate high-quality production, but as long as Microsoft expenses (on wages) decrease, why would this monopoly complain? ⬆

“Gates has created a huge blood-buying operation that only cares about money, not about people.”

--Chinese AIDS organisation manager, December 2009 (New York Times)