I’ve gotta say, it must be fun to work in Microsoft’s legal department. Personally, I tend to gauge whether my day is enjoyable by whether it was busy or slow, and more often than, unfortunately, my days at work are very slow. Not so much over in Redmond, it seems. It appears to never be a dull day, though whether the majority of what they have to deal with are credible or crackpot, we’ll not know. We do know one thing, however: this lawsuit is of the latter characteristic.
Microsoft is being sued yet again for allegedly knowingly selling, and profiting off of, defective products. Up to bat is a fine gentleman from Oak Forest, Illinois, who had to pay $99 to get his X-box 360 fixed. Surprisingly, though, this time, though, it seems the Red Ring of Death is not to blame. Unfortunately, the plaintiff doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong with his system, because Microsoft refused to tell him.
The unnamed plaintiff is hoping for a class-action suit, along with monetary damages (of course) and for Microsoft to stop selling 360s until they fix their hardware issues. Yeah, which of those things do you think is a bit more possible than the other?
I wouldn’t automatically accuse Microsoft of purposefully making broken hardware, because I don’t think any major company would intentionally put out a defective product, but the failure rate of their consoles has been incredibly questionable. Whether it was simply a rush job, a lack of oversight, or something totally beyond their control, who knows, but whatever it is, a total injunction against selling the system is no way to correct the problem.
