Many people have assumed that just because every time a new electronic device comes out around the holidays that the manufacturer of said device creates an artificial demand for the product by hyping it with advertising and then trickling in the supply. But Neil Thompson, Microsoft’s General Manager for Xbox U.K. said that the company is not engineering this demand, and that worldwide supply is very thin right now.
Anyone who actually works in the business of producing new technology, especially hardware technology, will know that these things are never managed,” said Thompson. “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.
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. It takes time to scale,” said Thompson. “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.
So there you have it, if you were hoping that Microsoft would magically ramp up supply to meet demand, you were wrong. There’s still hope however, they are plenty on Ebay, but of course they are upwards of $200.00 and increasing daily.
