I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem… was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was… I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
…
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT ‘dogfoods’ all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn’t there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
… And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
…
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used… there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use… but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
My favorite detail on the 3RL saga was when I took my second bricked unit to the local UPS store and they had a special bin for boxes that perfectly fit the 360 for shipping them back.
After a certain point, a bunch of the 360s… they weren’t even like, ‘fixed’.
They just … not sure of which exactly, this level of detail was basically rumors and contradictions from my POV…
But they were either just physically putting old hard drives in new units, that or just digitally transferring their contents over to new units…
And then they’d tell people ‘yup, your unit has been refurbished’.
Like, ship of theseus not withstanding… not really fixing them, no, rofl.
And then this would lead to other problems like… ooops, we didn’t correctly re register your new 360’s serial number to your Live account, or we didn’t deregister the old one, and now you’re unjustly banned because MSFT tech support fucked up.
…
Assuming my memory is still reasonably sccurate:
Though it did vary somewhat from team to team, the internal nomenclature my team was using was… 3RR.
Like, 1RR, 2RR, 3RR, 4RR.
While all of them were quite problematic, 3RR was the one that… basically 100% of the time, no over the phone, web instructions, or even RMA … could actually fix that one.
For the other codes, following over the phone / web instructions could actually fix it sometimes, or an RMA repair could actually fix it with a speific hardware component replacement… that or it was a problem with the actual cable connecting to the TV, or the Xbox was like, jammed in a little nook with no airflow, and dudes were chain smoking blunts in their apartment, rofl.
I used to do V Dash contracts for MSFT.
I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem… was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was… I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
…
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT ‘dogfoods’ all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn’t there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
… And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
…
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used… there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use… but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
It is a gigantic fucking mess.
My favorite detail on the 3RL saga was when I took my second bricked unit to the local UPS store and they had a special bin for boxes that perfectly fit the 360 for shipping them back.
It was a mess.
After a certain point, a bunch of the 360s… they weren’t even like, ‘fixed’.
They just … not sure of which exactly, this level of detail was basically rumors and contradictions from my POV…
But they were either just physically putting old hard drives in new units, that or just digitally transferring their contents over to new units…
And then they’d tell people ‘yup, your unit has been refurbished’.
Like, ship of theseus not withstanding… not really fixing them, no, rofl.
And then this would lead to other problems like… ooops, we didn’t correctly re register your new 360’s serial number to your Live account, or we didn’t deregister the old one, and now you’re unjustly banned because MSFT tech support fucked up.
…
Assuming my memory is still reasonably sccurate:
Though it did vary somewhat from team to team, the internal nomenclature my team was using was… 3RR.
Like, 1RR, 2RR, 3RR, 4RR.
While all of them were quite problematic, 3RR was the one that… basically 100% of the time, no over the phone, web instructions, or even RMA … could actually fix that one.
For the other codes, following over the phone / web instructions could actually fix it sometimes, or an RMA repair could actually fix it with a speific hardware component replacement… that or it was a problem with the actual cable connecting to the TV, or the Xbox was like, jammed in a little nook with no airflow, and dudes were chain smoking blunts in their apartment, rofl.
I guess at this point it’s served its function. It’s made its money. Most people use mobile OSs/web nowadays anyway.