Originally posted by: Wingznut
Originally posted by: Zim Hosein
Originally posted by: FFactory0x
3 market launch???
US, UK & Japan I believe.
Yep... All within only a few weeks. I don't believe it's ever been (successfully) done before.
Btw, a launch of that kind is more likely to cause a shortage.
Q: Your shipping schedule is very ambitious. Nobody has tried to ship to three different territories simultaneously and for a good reason. It's very difficult. You've got chip manufacturers hopefully churning out perfect chips, and how is your yield of good to bad chips? Then you have assembly, manufacturing, shipping all over the world. So, how are you going to do it? How many units will you ship to North America, and how many do you plan on shipping total in North America?
Allard: We have a term for this. It's a very technical term. It's called a very hard problem. It's just hard. So, the first thing is, I cannot comment on the numbers. You can try all you want, but I won't give any up. Partly because we're only in the beginning of manufacturing. The ramp rate we're aiming for is very, very steep. We're hoping to manufacture them at a rate that's much more aggressive than anybody's done before. And it's going very well. But until that sort of evens out, attaining a cruising altitude in manufacturing, I don't even have a very accurate forecast for my boss. And until that happens, we don't really tell anybody else. The other thing is, with the financial community, we have to be very deliberate about releasing information like that for all sorts of reasons. We have to be cautious of regulatory issues. That's why we don't comment on the numbers.
But manufacturing is going very well. And honestly we decided as a management team that we'd rather take the heat from all territories saying we wish we had more. And we'll have to say "sold out" in too many places. We'd rather take that heat, then take the heat from Europe saying, "Why do we have to wait a year?" We designed a worldwide product with worldwide partners, and with worldwide ambition, and the world deserves to see it all at the same time, and we're not going to have enough. That's the fact. No matter how aggressive we are with the ramp rate, no matter how good our yields are, that's going to be the fact, which is another reason that manufacturers are worldwide. So hopefully you guys are thoughtful of that in how you report the news, and there will be "sold out" signs out there, and we know we're going to take some heat, but hopefully it's the right thing for the industry. And I think that Gerhardt Florin (Executive VP at EA Europe) said last night, "You know, sometimes the right thing to do is the gutsy thing to do, which is the hard thing to do." And our partners are certainly glad we're doing it, and I think that gamers worldwide are glad we're doing it.
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/660/660456p2.html
