Microsoft: Hardware Failures Are “Well Behind Us”

Is the legacy of the Red Ring of Death and E47 hardware failures really behind Microsoft? Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg thinks so.

Last week numbers from a Game Informer survey revealed that Xbox 360 hardware failures – specifically the infamous Red Ring of Death – are astoundingly common, with more than half of the surveyed subscribers reporting to have experienced a console dying on them. Regardless of the veracity of the numbers, it is something of a sad state of affairs when having your console die on you is simply something you expect as a 360 owner.

Microsoft gave a pretty plain PR type response to the survey a few days ago, but now the company’s Xbox Live and Xbox 360 director of project management, Aaron Greenberg, has spoken up, and he seems to think that hardware failures are a legacy that Microsoft has managed to shake.

“I can tell you the consoles we’re making today have lower-heat chips and better cooling, and we’re seeing fantastic quality in those consoles today,” Greenberg told GameSpot. “That said, I know people have had issues with systems, which were bought earlier in the life cycle, and that’s part of the reason why we implemented our unprecedented three-year warranty for anyone who gets the three red-ring flashing light error or the E74 error.”

With everything that Microsoft has done to deal with the problem and everything it presently is doing, Greenberg thinks that the company has accomplished enough to ditch the stigma of the RroD. “So I think we’ve made it clear we stand by the quality of our product, and we will make it right by fixing the problem at no extra cost to you,” Greenberg said. “But at the same time, we’ve been working hard to make improvements in the products we’re currently making, so I really feel like most of this is well behind us.”

What say you, 360 owners? Do you feel like the whole hardware failure thing is behind Microsoft, or, more importantly, behind you when your console breaks? I don’t think this is a legacy Microsoft is going to shed for a long time coming. As long as people own 360s that break – and plenty do – hardware failures will be a problem.