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It looks like Microsoft needs to institute a policy of not providing any vacation or holiday pay, for the period from approx. Dec. 20 - Jan. 5 and probably for every other major Holiday period, to the engineers that work on the Xbox Live system.  It seems, sadly, that every year we see the problems with Xbox Live.  Too many users trying to get on all at the same time.  Except that should never be a problem, since Microsoft should surely be able to tell how many users use the system at peak, and should be able to estimate how many new users they'll get over the holidays {I guess they use their own pathetic Office software to do their estimating with and can't get a real answer back from same}.

Seriously, Xbox Live has been as bad as a couple of high school kids sexually experimenting:

He: Oh, I think I'm in...

Her: Ah, try again...

You get the idea.

Actually it's been up and down so much, maybe the better comparison is to the chicken ranch in Nevada... {wink, wink}

Either way, it's pretty pathetic.  I had cracked a joke, among friends, that my friends and I should be glad that we don't have Sony running Xbox Live.  That was a few days back actually.  My point at the time is that Sony's Playstation Network is a virtual ghost town most of the time, and worse yet for Sony, it just isn't as feature rich and friendly as is Xbox Live.  It is free, but as my friends noted, you sort of get what you pay for.  Most of the time, that is.  Sadly, lately, we've certainly not been getting what we pay for out of Xbox Live.

Microsoft would seem to owe every Xbox Live user about 2 extra weeks of free time on the service at this point, because, as usual, every time there is a big holiday and time off for most of the country, the usage overwhelms the system and everyone is left hating life unable to play on the service they pay for.

Bleh.  Thanks for being Scrooges here Microsoft.