Chatting to Industry Gamers, Microsoft senior director of global marketing guy Albert Penello says the company is putting its notorious Red Ring of Death problems behind them. Not least of all by replacing the new Xbox 360’s red DANGER DANGER!!!11 LEDs with a conspicuously inconspicuous dot.
“Well, you know it’s unfortunate and, believe me, it’s my least favorite thing to talk about, part of our history,” starts Penello, gearing up for a massive quote block. “I think most people agree it’s become a little bit of an Internet meme now, just a thing to say. I feel bad for the customers that have had to go through the experiences that they’ve had, but, fundamentally, almost everybody will tell you that consoles purchased in the last two or three years, that problem doesn’t occur. It’s really people that had launch consoles and some of the early hiccups in getting those repaired and back out to people. But really, our focus over the last few years has been continuous improvement and getting the existing boxes rock steady. The box that you bought a year ago or even two years ago isn’t really having a problem. I mean, when you sell 40 million of something, the hard part is that any part of consumer electronics, automobiles, even DVD players, which are about as commoditised as you can get, the nature of manufacturing means there’s going to be a small handful that have problems. For the most part, the overall quality problem has been fixed for a couple of years now. This is an evolution of that work. The decision not to put the three red rings in it was just because it’s something I want to put behind us.”
So, like, inb4 the Red Dot of Death taking the world by storm.
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