Steve Balmer, the CEO of Microsoft, announced that the year 2010 was a remarkable year for Microsoft as the company introduced the Xbox360 Kinect, Microsoft Office2010, Windows Phone7 and Internet Explorer9. Balmer demonstrated through a presentation the Windows Pnone7 and also it's in built Xbox multiplayer live facilities. He mentioned that the company's success was mainly due to its "big bets" of the year one of which was Kinect featuring motion controlled gaming. Another new Xbox360 feature, Avatar Kinect, was disclosed through which players would be able to interact with one another. Balmer said that Xbox was eventually turning into the heart of the consumer's living room. There were different video partnerships such as ESPN, Hulu which were added to the Xbox thus enabling a video-on-demand service to its users. With such features the year seemed to be the biggest ever for Xbox.

Microsoft sold Kinects of about eight million marking a huge year for the Xbox. But now it faces criticism because the consumers have reported that it has been causing failures when used on Xbox360 consoles. The Kinect on being connected with the console within a short period makes it unusable. The problem which arises after connecting the Kinect is named `red king of death'. It is named such because as per reports the power button of Xbox360 which displays green light turns red signaling a complex error which can be fixed only by sending it back to the Microsoft. However a Redmond Co. official has denied the fact that the error is due to Kinect and added that the flashing of red lights is just a matter of co-incidence. Also there were certain reports of about 30% failure of Xbox360 in 2007 which costed the company about 1 billion USD and whether or not the present incident has any relation with the one in 2007 is unknown.