Microsoft Giving Xbox Live Users a Free Game 265
Earlier this week we covered the Xbox Live outages over the holidays. Several users have pointed out that Microsoft has acknowledged its lack of performance, and is now offering a free game to compensate its users. Unfortunately for Microsoft, disgruntled patrons have already filed a class action lawsuit over the recent difficulties. Quoting the PC World article:
"Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten said that the problems with Xbox Live downtime were caused by an influx of new users who had gotten an Xbox 360 over the holidays. It's been a record-setting season for Xbox Live. 'This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service,' said Whitten."
Problems still not resolved as of last night... (Score:5, Informative)
Daily statistics of down time XBOX-live (Score:4, Informative)
SLA? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Problems still not resolved as of last night... (Score:1, Informative)
here [vgchartz.com]
There are several other references to it onliine as well.
Re:SLA? (Score:3, Informative)
Also it's considered a binding contract according to the ITIL definition of service level management for services provided to *external* clients (ie, everybody who uses xbox live). So that is probably why they're giving away a free game in order to avert the class action suit due to this binding contract.
yes I know, I'm nitpicking on the definition of an SLA
Re:Microsoft Blasting (Score:3, Informative)
Psst.... Yes they do. well, not in the US. But in Canada. All XPS technical support for North America is done out of a call center in Ottawa, Ontario. That's for the US and Canada, in both English and French, Spanish is done out of Panama. Likewise, for the business line of products... that is Optiplex, some Dimension, Vostro, and Latitude systems, it's all done in NA.
Otherwise, I agree with you fully. Quite aside from that... a free video game is probably worth a lot more to the end user than any settlement they'd see out of a class action suit. And the fact that MS has already offered the video game of their own volition probably means that any class action would get thrown out of court. It's pretty hard to prove damages when you've already been offered a freebie that's worth more than the cost of a month's subscription, let alone the 5 days that it was actually out.
Obligatory disclaimer... I have an @dell.com e-mail address.
Re:They paid for it (Score:3, Informative)
To Microsoft, there is a very real cost involved in providing you a free game - if you ever took economics, you would have learned about "Opportunity Cost" - where basically giving you the game costs them the full cost of the game as they have given up the opportunity to charge you for it. Although the opportunity cost decreases on average as it encounters people who would otherwise not have bought it anyway, the chance of it approaching zero is virtually non-existent.
Oh, and provisioning it to silver members too incurs an actual physical cost, as silver members do not contribute to the upkeep of the network, therefore any bandwidth they use is sunk cost (after all, Microsoft DOES have to pay for it).
You're just trying to justify why they should give you something for free, when in reality they have no obligation to give you anything at all (try reading to terms and conditions of service).
Though, it would be better just giving the value of the arcade game in MS points and letting us decide what to put it towards, that'd probably go down better.
Re:Problems still not resolved as of last night... (Score:3, Informative)
5-10 days later, ops has the servers. Then ops gets building services to ship them to the labs. Then ops load tests the servers. Then they set it up with management tools, setup backups, and add it to the automation pool. This is about 2-3 weeks later, at best. (remember, ops needs to do this for every other department as well as yours, which for Microsoft, is a *LOT* of departments.)
Then you finally get your hands on it, and can roll your software out, scale test it, etc, fix bugs, make sure that it's solving the problem, go back to the drawing board, because it probably isn't, get software patches in place, etc, and then finally organise the new equipment to go live.
By now, 2-3 months have passed. This is the same in EVERY company I've worked for, including microsoft. The process exists to make sure that people don't get screwed. The problem is, the process is slow, and that's probably unavoidable.
Keep in mind that XBox is a loss leader. They don't have craploads of cash to throw at hardware, because they're living on what is effectively negative margins, in the hopes that licensing will catch up in a few years. Compare this to windows or office, where the profits are enough to fund multiple other new startup projects at once (Including the one I work for, thanks office!
So when someone underestimates the amount of xboxes that are going to get sold over Christmas, you're suddenly finding yourself short to the tune of N% of your required capacity, because you were saving money by operating at 80% instead of the 50% you'd be looking at if you could afford it. Keep in mind that the money from retailers doesn't filter back for a few months, as far as accounts is concerned.
Also, I'm willing to bet that bandwidth isn't the problem so much as simple scaling. This could well be something that just requires some better thinking on the software side, but I don't know much about the inner workings of xbox live's server-side stuff.
Anyway, to put all this into simple words. A bigger company doesn't necessarily mean that scale's an easy problem to deal with.
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