BASED on the past week's news, Microsoft's RRoD saga takes a turn for the worse. RRoD has already cost Xbox literally billions in losses and Microsoft will be cutting corners from now on by not providing customers victims with “coffins” in which to bury their dead Xbox 360s and ship them to Microsoft/repair.
These days Microsoft is no longer shipping gamers who have a dead Xbox 360 a postage-paid cardboard packing box (affectionately called the "coffin") for the return of the console. While Microsoft still pays for shipping both ways, it's up to the console owner to provide the packing materials for the trip back to the repair center.
Talking to the Kotaku blog, Reggie Fils-Aime, the president of Nintendo of America, went on the offensive, saying that “I think we would have been embarrassed to do what our competitors are currently doing,” adding that “all I can tell you is that we will innovate. We will provide something new. Something that the consumer and the industry will look at and say, 'Wow, I didn't see that coming'.”
There is a growing gap between what business technologists want from Windows Phone 7 and what Microsoft may actually deliver.
Sadly for Microsoft, when you start digging into the actual documents, you immediately realize: Microsoft might suddenly care about design in a new way. But it doesn't mean that they've actually changed as a company.
Normally the departure of a key program manager does not signal positive things about a product, particularly with only a few months to go before it ships. But Mel Sampat said today that his decision to leave Microsoft's Windows Phone team to start his own app development firm was actually a vote of confidence in the company's potential to support a strong ecosystem of third-party apps.