Peter Moore is an clearly trying to pull a fast one on us. Seriously, trying to blame the Xbox 360 shortages on overeager retailers taking too many preorders is ridiculous. But here’s the quote:

‘It’s difficult,’ Moore said. ‘A lot of retailers, I think, stretched their allocation. Individual retail store managers said, ‘I’m going to take a fly that I’m going to get 200 Xbox 360s on day one and take the preorders accordingly,’ and they only got 100 or 150. Well that’s 100 or 50 disappointed people. We have to manage that.’

So are the retailers to blame for taking unlimited pre-orders before they knew what their allocations would be like? Sure, but that’s their job. On the other hand, an argument can be made that Microsoft knew that demand would be high, and chose to spread themselves too thin anyway. Pre-order numbers were coming in early enough that Microsoft knew there weren’t going to be enough to go around. People were pre-ordering back in July. Yet, Microsoft has kept production steady in order to ensure brisk sales throughout Q4.

Of course, there’s the other answer. The more time that passes, the cheaper the hardware will be to produce. Why make five million consoles that you have to take a $75 bath on now, when you can stretch that out over several months and reduce the cost on the consoles released later? I also take issue with the “... and they only got 100 or 150” comment. The only stores that got that many were either Microsoft’s “launch partners”, or were in California or New York.