Microsoft Xbox 360 was Rushed to Beat Sony Claimed

An '...individual who has worked on the Xbox 360 project for many years' has gone public with his (or her) claims that the Xbox 360 was doomed to hardware failures from the outset.

That same source has further claimed that Microsoft knows who he (or she) is. They have also explained the motivation behind launching a detailed and lengthy attack on the company's management as well as it's gaming hardware.

"I have always been in a position to stand up for the customer. MS stopped me from doing that. They need to pay the price now", is the crusading message.

If you've not yet seen the full interview, high (or low) lights include:

"Whenever something failed and there was a question about whether the test result was false, they would remove that test, retest and ship, or see if the unit would boot a game and run briefly and then ship. 360 is too complex of a machine to get away with that."

"It's (the failure rate) around 30%, and all will probably fail early".

"I've heard that the failure rates for the current design is sub 10%".

"This quarter they are expecting 1 M failures, most of those Xenons. Some of those are repeat failures. Life expectancy is all over the map because the design has very little margin for most of the important parameters. That means it's not a fault tolerant design".

"MS has under resourced that product unit in all engineering areas since the very beginning".

"Second, MS was so focused on beating Sony this cycle that the 360 was rushed to market when all indications were that it had serious flaws".

"That management team had made some pretty bad decisions in the past and had never had to pay a proportional consequence".

"They would rationalize that if the first few million boxes had a high failure rate, a few 10's of millions of dollars would cover it. And contrasting that cost with a big lead on Sony, would pay it in a heartbeat".

"They weren't even thinking about Nintendo".

We have contacted Microsoft for any official comment regarding the claims made within the piece. As yet no response is forthcoming. SPOnG will be shocked if the company avoids the issue entirely. We would hope that, for the sake of Xbox 360 owners (and Microsoft stockholders), a full clarification is quickly made public as this would be preferable to an long, drawn-out battle in the courts - or even the more usual "out of court settlement".