Red ring of death

Online warranty company SquareTrade.com sent me an e-mail today claiming that, based on a survey of more than 1,000 Xbox 360 warranties sold through the site, Microsoft's console has a 16.4 percent failure rate.

Of those failures, the fabled Red Ring o' Death accounted for 60 percent of the problems.

I'm actually a little surprised that it was only 16.4 percent, but SquareTrade doesn't say how long it's been selling warranties.

Because I suspect the failure rate for the first batch of consoles sold in late 2005/early 2006 was pretty close to 100 percent.

Also, I highly recommend this article from an anonymous source claiming to be a Microsoft insider. Again, it's anonymous, but it has the ring of truth.

What a fiasco. Granted, in the big scheme of things, it's just a game console.

But it's a game console that people have spent hundreds of dollars to buy, and invested hundreds more in games and peripherals.

Microsoft is acting extremely dishonorably, and is doing untold damage to its brand with this kind of shoddy treatment of its customers.

UPDATE: I see from the comments that I have not been clear on what I'm complaining about. Yes, Microsoft is fixing the broken consoles. But the problem is that Microsoft is apparently taking WEEKS to do so. To those readers and commenters who feel I'm being unfair to Microsoft, ask yourself this: If your console had broken down for the second (or third, or fourth, or worse) time, and each repair took weeks to complete, and you kept receiving malfunctioning units back from Microsoft, would you feel that Microsoft had done a good job taking care of you, the customer? Or would you feel that they were doing the absolute minimum to avoid a class action lawsuit?