DIY troubles

Most of us could let the receivers do it for us. Bill Gates presumably just set back the scheduled date for finding a cure for malaria by six months.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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"But in the end, by going cheap -- hoping to save tens of millions of dollars in ASIC design costs, Microsoft ended up paying more than $1 billion for its Xbox 360 recall."

They did more than just going cheap. To ship a product that overheats and fails requires either to quality control, or (more likely) quality control being overridden by management.

It has been my experience that costing the company a *million* dollars gets you fired, but that costing the company a *billion* dollars gets you a "retention bonus to keep key members of the management team from leaving during this difficult time." :(

That kind of $1bn mistake has to require a substantial team effort.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

There are two reasons for outsourcing such a critical design. a) It is likely to be done better b) If it isn't you can sue them.

Agreed; How does a thermal problem like this get past QC. They should have known during the pilot run that they had a thermal problem.

Which leads to the next question: What's the level of QC with software products?

Ever read the book, "Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat?" It makes the point that failing to deliver on a "big" project is often viewed, overall, as more positive than delivering a product on-schedule and on-budget for a somewhat smaller project: People "understand" the difficulty in the case of the former and somehow assume that surely the project *almost* made it, whereas they tend to dismiss the "ease" of the later.

Sounds like the work of the "block diagram" nitwits just pasting together a bunch of library functions and "applying" the technology. And because the intracompany relations were informal, and likely adversarial, there is a strong possibility they were sabotaged. This is the JT mentality: sociopaths looking for revenge for some imagined affront such as failure to recognize one as being a living God...But don't you worry about those deeper issues, just read the article at your usual dimwit level...

Usually once. Then they realize that the "easy" project turned into a noise, EMC, crosstalk or whatever nightmare and they really shouldn't have done it on the cheap.

"John Larkin" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Looks like MS tried to make hardware the same way they (and many others) make software. As long as I remember, software was allowed to have bugs, to be two to ten times larger then needed and has to be patched every now and then. Hardware on the other hand should never fail. Remember the commotion on the pentium floating point bug. Maybe there will ever be a time that software has to fullfill the same requirements hardware has to do. I doubt MS will survive then. (I even doubt I'll live to see the day either :)

petrus bitbyter

I strongly suspect that they *did* know, and were ordered to ship it anyway. This is Microsoft we are talking about. If they had a QC department that had the power to stop them from shipping crap, QC would have stopped them from shippingd Windows 2.0, Windows ME, and Vista.

Have you ever read the FOCUS Magazine Interview with Bill Gates? You can find it at [

I guess their "ship bugs and sell-the-fixes" secret-to-success formula doesn't translate quite as well to hardware. Oddly, people expect hardware to work.

James Arthur

FPGAs now make it possible for us to ship buggy hardware, and charge people for upgrades.

John

We used to have a saying back at the 'Lazy B'. Heads roll uphill.

I have to deal with a s**tpot full of such. I snap things where the sun don't shine for them as frequently as i can.

Personally, in that position, i would prosecute them to the point of persecuting them all the way into poverty.