Former Microsoft Executive Says Steve Ballmer Saved Xbox Brand During Xbox 360 RRoD Saga

Most of us remember the Xbox 360’s Red Ring of Death saga. Xbox 360 hardware failed for most of the customers due to heating issues and Microsoft decided to replace them all which cost them in billions. Peter Moore who is now at EA but an Xbox executive back when Xbox 360 RRoD thing happened. In an IGN podcast, he revealed more details about this whole repair program. When they found out the issue after thousands of customer reports, they had a business review meeting with then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. He

“And, I am trembling sat in front of Steve, who I love to death, but he can be an intimidating human being. Steve said, ‘okay, talk me through this.’ I said, ‘if we don’t do this, this brand is dead. This is a Tylenol moment.'”

Moore continued: “Steve looked at me and said, ‘what have we got to do?’ I said, ‘we’ve got to take them all back, and we’ve got to do this in a first class way,’ because when you take a console away from a gamer, and you’re going to spend three weeks fixing it… so we’ve got to FedEx this all the way. We’ve got to FedEx this all the way. We’ve got to overnight it back in two.

“He said, ‘what’s it going to cost?’ I remember taking a deep breath, looking at Robbie, and saying, ‘we think it’s $1.15bn, Steve.’ He said, ‘do it.’ There was no hesitation.

He credited Steve Ballmer for taking the right decision even though the cost of the program was over billion dollars.

“If you’re an Xbox gamer, you can thank Steve Ballmer for not even hesitating. Now, we were a wealthy company who could afford to do that, but not even hesitating because the brand was more important.

“If we hadn’t made that decision there and then, and tried to fudge over this problem, then the Xbox brand and Xbox One wouldn’t exist today.”

Read more about it from the link below.

Source: Eurogamer.net