360 Pros and Cons

 Okay, so putting aside my personal experience with customer service, the 360 is still pretty awesome.  Unlike in previous console generations, I don't feel like there's some other console than can offer anything close to the same experience.

So, what are the pros of a 360?

It has best online interface in a console ever, the most games I'm interested in, the best online store, the most new content, the greatest diversity in new content, controllers that don't desynchronize, updates that take less than a minute rather than hours, etc.

The cons of the system have more to do with the pitfalls of the greater number of services offered than with overall poor planning.  You can't make a more complicated product without also creating more end-user issues.  The biggest downside as far as I'm concerned is their support system's total inability to acknowledge any contingency other than the 2 most common user errors or the known RRoD issue.  The product and the network of services it provides access to are sufficiently complex that unusual issues that are not user-generated should not be an unexpected (or a denied) occurrence.

While their roaming account option is by far the most lenient DRM scheme in place, it is also the most technically challenging and, therefore, the most likely to have problems.

You cannot avoid ads for other products and services while enjoying your previous purchases if you want to use the product the way it is intended to be used (online.)  This is a big con if you happen to dislike the aggressively hip, young, irreverent, and overall loud tone of their branding.  Because it is so specific in the type of person it courts, it actively discourages potential players from outside the current expected demographic in a way that previous console generations did not.  The commercials for a Genesis were loud, but the Genesis itself remained silent once it was in your home.  This in-product branding could prevent the game market from expanding into new demographic markets.

Because of the way in which Marketplace is set up, consumers have no recourse if a service or product is not as described or flat out doesn't work.  Consumer laws protect people who buy things with money, not with Microsoft-brand space bucks.  When asked for support on an Arcade game, Microsoft reps will often say you should contact the developer because it's their responsibility.  The developers say that it's Microsoft's responsibility.  Everyone claims to have no power in the matter.  Microsoft has even told me that the faulty printing on an MS Points card was the retail store's responsibility.  They said that I should return the opened card to the retailer.  Obviously, that didn't work.

So what does this all add up to?  There's not some magic formula to determine how much BS it's worth putting up with for a leisure activity.  For now, I've decided not to use the paycheck I just got to buy a replacement 360 (which was the plan until my most recent customer service experience.)  The pleasure I get out of a 360 isn't worth the grief I have to put up with right now.  But it's really a shame that the customer service link breaks the chain for me.  When you take the time to think about it, the hardware and software engineering feats on the console are stunning.

The 360 is my favorite console of the current generation, and I'm happy with the DRM, hardware, interface, and (in the case of MS Points Cards) manufacturing changes that Microsoft has made in response to mass demand.  It's too bad that they are currently unable to deal with any unusual customer service requests.  Given the millions of units they sell and the thousands of programs that must interface, there's bound to be some unusual issues.

There seems to be no capacity for individual customer service among agents who are frantically reading support articles for the first time while I'm on the phone with them, and who are completely unfamiliar with Microsoft's own terminology.  Based on their inability to understand physical descriptions of the Xbox and it's GUI, it is apparent that many customer service agents have never even seen a 360 in person.

If they improve their customer service, I'll be back on a 360 in no time.  Until then, I'll be playing a Nintendo DS.  It has way fewer features, but I've never had any issues getting the console or any game to work.  I've heard that Sony and Nintendo's customer service is just as bad as Microsoft's, but I've never needed to use it.

The PS3 still sucks.