Robbie Bach Issues Xbox 360 Shortage Statement - Promises New Supplies

Plus ça change? Or whatever it is that our French brousins say...

But what, really does change. No significant new launch can hope to meet Day 0 requirements. And everyone lies about it, for two reasons. One, to not discourage people by admitting that they can't get their dream new hot toy for 8 months, and two because rare (scarcity, not the development studio) is hot.

We've seen it before. We'll see it at least twice more in the next 12 months or so.

This is true. Not everybody tries to fulfil to the world at once though.

Microsoft have put themselves in sight of a hole, if not actually in it by "going global" with the 360's launch. All it takes is one component to run behind on delivery, maybe low yield on the CPU or GPU wafers, and now your stocks run low for real.

By delivering to three global regions at once, presumably with tailored hardware for region locking and the like, you are really making huge demands on your production capability that you just can't sustain through the lifetime of the product.

So you lower the ship-in figures for each region and live with lower first day sales. You redefine the way a launch is managed by concentrating on the "launch window" which could be the time between US and JP launch days or could extend into sometime next year.

This makes everybody very angry at the same time instead of a few people slightly angry at various times through the year. However, it doesn't stop loads of people making profit from eBay auctions as we have seen today.

Not that Sony's launch of the PSP is a great way to do things either, mind you.

I think the US will be more pissed off than Europe as we are allways left behind by 9 month or more.

Now its just 10days!! :)