It now becomes a ‘whodunit’ when big bucks become the motivation for getting to the bottom of Xbox Live’s recent problems. Was it really a denial of service hack that has plagued Xbox Live or was it just heavy traffic as they are now officially claiming? This certainly isn’t the first time they’ve put spins on the truth. MS may find themselves backpedaling again as a lawsuit has come up over the loss of services. Their decision to downplay the problems might not have been the right thing to do. Because now if they wish to defend themselves they might want to find those supposed hackers, pretty fast.

People do not like it when their toys don’t work on Christmas morning. They really, really don’t like it to the tune of millions of dollars. Three unsatisfied gamers are looking for an excess of $5 million in damages. The lawsuit, claims “Microsoft’s outages represent a breach of contract and negligent misrepresentation for which the software maker is liable.”

“Microsoft knew the increase in subscriptions would increase game play on its servers,” outlines the suit, “yet [it] failed to provide adequate access and service to Xbox Live and its subscribers.”

The suit doesn’t claim specific amounts of money, but notes the amount is in excess of $5 million. How do you put a price on Christmas morning? While some sources have suggested that the recent problems with Xbox Live were actually the result of hacking, Microsoft denied it, saying that “record numbers” of users had been trying to access the service during the Christmas period and that’s what caused the down time. By taking that stance they’ve walked right into a lawsuit that calls them out on not being able to provide the service that people are paying fees for. Apparently all users will be given a download of a free Xbox Live Arcade video-game.

But what will MS do ultimately? They are not known for their good karma. I remember how Bill Gates stole the original Apple operating system from the Great Wizard Woz in the seventies and reverse engineered it, dubbing it the Dirty Operating System (DOS) and won the copy right lawsuit against Apple because the judge couldn’t understand the technological language. It’s a historic suit that MS could never have won in today’s savvy judicial system.

Lest we forget history and begin to think that computers were invented by Microsoft in the 1980′s, lets look at a laundry list of ‘mSins’

• Microsoft issued a prerelease development kit for its OLE technology to its competitors. When they actually released OLE, they purposefully modified it so that it would crash the competitors’ software that had used the development kit.
• Microsoft bundled a bunch of its products together to create an “office suite”, then sold it in a package, thus crushing its competitors who were all making individual products. This strategy was later used against Netscape.
• Don’t forget the numerous anti trust and monopoly lawsuits that have been filed and won around the world against them. “Los Angeles Times reported, “Letters purportedly written by at least two dead people landed on the desk of Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff earlier this year, imploring him to go easy on Microsoft Corp. for its conduct as a monopoly.”
• In 1999 investigative journalist Duncan Campbell revealed that: “A careless mistake by Microsoft programmers has shown that special access codes for use by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) have been secretly built into all versions of the Windows operating system.”
• Microsoft has funded nearly a dozen think tanks that have released papers attacking open-source software.
• And then there was Windows 98. Not to mention Vista… Source : SourceWatch.org

Bill Gates and his companies are not nice people. It can hardly be expected for them to be honest. Judging from their history it’s about the bottom line. That’s it.

But now that deified profit margin has met up with a very loud sector of the American public. The big bucks rolling in may stop with gamers who have the big balls to stand up to Microsoft.

The Xbox 360 was rushed into production with inferior parts that make the red ring of death appear. It was very apparent to anyone with tech knowledge (me) or anyone who was reading tech websites in ’05 that the thing was going to overheat and have problems. Remember the power cords that were catching on fire? One in three Xboxes crap out which is a very high number for an appliance.

What will Microsoft do? Has Bill Gates had a change of heart? He has been giving buckets of his ill gotten gains to charity. Guilty conscience?

I love all my Halo playing girl clans. So many of my friends and readers are 360 users, and when it does work it is great. I look out for them and feel a responsibility to the next gen of geeks to teach them about the past.

“Granny Geek Woman why won’t you play Halo?”
“Gather round my child and let me tell you about a time before Microsoft.”