Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
End of an Era wrote:
Although it's complete arse that this happened in the first pace, the repair service was exceptionally quick (and free).
It bothers me that people praise Microsoft for this. They shipped a £300 consumer electronics device with a catastrophic design failure they should have caught in QA. The extended warranty and reasonable (ish... there are plenty of less happy people too) customer service is the least they can do to avoid getting sued.
It's not out of the goodness of their hearts. It's partly a pre-emptive legal requirement (the alternative being losing a big class-action claim) and partly a PR move to counter the (let's face it) terrible image the 360 had as "the thing that breaks".
In the context of other household goods, though, I think it's actually pretty reasonable. In the past 6 months I've had two fairly new high priced items go kaput; one a £2000 oven and the other a £300 tumble drier. Both expired out of warranty, the oven was repairable but cost £500 to get fixed but the tumble drier was beyond economic repair and so got landfilled (or taken to the recycling centre and then landfilled by the council).
Fair enough the 360 may have a design fault, fair enough MS may have been slow to accept fault and fair enough it may just be more economical for MS to do this rather than face law suits, but as a consumer I was impressed at the speed and convenience of MS returns process.