Its funny, for a company that is so against the negative ads against their OS from Mac, they have no issue in slinging mud against others. I think what we see here results from the fact that for the first time in years Microsoft has competition. They had almost no real competition in the OS market and despite Mac's blustering, they still own the vast majority of the OS market.
Now with the consoles, they lost out to PS 2 and put their focus on the Xbox 360. I live near Seattle and was covering a press function where a Microsoft employee told me that the pending PS 3 was no real threat as it was all cutting edge parts that do not work with one another and that PS 3 systems had been catching on fire during testing and this is what the delay was.
So, after a b ad experience with the original Xbox, namely one year after release, I went out to buy a console with a gift card that was given to us for a promotion. The system would not even operate nor open out of the box. I waited a bit over a year when the 360 came out and got two systems. One for me, one for my father in law. My new system red ringed 7 days after I got it, his took 6 months.
In contrast, my PS 3 was sent to me about 10 days after the launch, it is the original 60 Gig system. To this day, not one error, not one glitch ever.
I always thought that Microsoft was so intent on being first to market to grab the lead, they tended not to overlook system issues and instead focused on slinging mud.
I remeber the big issue about the unit price when it shipped. I did a radio segment and article where I took a base Xbox 360 unit. By the time you added the Hard Drive, a Wifi Kit, and the external HD player, it was more than the PS 3 and had 40 Gig less on the HD.
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