Shortages are ”never managed” when it comes to launching new technology, it’s just a ”function of coming to market” - they will ”scale up” soon.
”Anyone who actually works in the business of producing new technology, especially hardware technology, will know that these things are never managed. Everyone else loves to think that they’re managed, but they will know it’s not. It’s a function of coming to market with a brand new innovation and you have to scale up,” said Neil Thompson.
The Xbox UK and Ireland general manager is working some PR damage control after some suggested that Microsoft was being a little underhanded with Kinect stock. Don Mattrick warned US consumers to make sure they preorder to avoid missing out.
Naturally this preorder ‘advice’ starting the rumours they were in fact keeping stock relatively low to help purport the idea that it’s the new super hot ‘must-have’ thing for Christmas. Actually the reality says Thompson is ‘adjustment’ to demand.
”The choices you always have are: do we launch in November or do we wait until February, March when we could hit some bigger launch numbers but then we miss Christmas. So you’re always in this fine balance, saying ‘well, we want to give people the product as soon as we can, but you can’t switch on the manufacturing like water,’” he continued.
”It takes time to scale.” Microsoft plan to sell 5 million units of Kinect by the end of the year. They’ve already reached the half way point to that.
”It’s absolutely not a strategy, we want to get the product into consumers hands as quickly as we can because we think it’s exciting, it’s innovative. We wanted to do that for Christmas and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve built a really strong supply and resupply chain over the coming weeks.” Kinect launched worldwide and wasn’t staggered.
”Often consumer electronics companies and games companies have staggered their launches by territory by some quite considerable margins. With Kinect we launched around the world in three weeks. That was a huge task. No region is being penalised,” added Xbox UK marketing manager, Stephen McGill. ”We’re trying to make sure every region has a good amount of stock every week. That can’t be underestimated either.”
Have you got Kinect for Xbox 360, or do you want it for Christmas?
