OPERATIONS

To serve the needs of customers around the world and to improve the quality and usability of products in international markets, we “localize” many of our products to reflect local languages and conventions. Localizing a product may require modifying the user interface, altering dialog boxes, and translating text. Our research and development facilities are located primarily in Redmond, Washington with smaller facilities located in Mountain View, California; Fargo, North Dakota; Beijing, China; Dublin, Ireland; Vedbaek, Denmark; Hyderabad, India; Haifa, Israel; and Cambridge, England.

We have regional operations centers in Ireland; Singapore; Reno, Nevada; Fargo, North Dakota; and Redmond. The centers support all operations in their regions, including customer contract and order processing, credit and collections, information processing and vendor management and logistics. The regional center in Dublin, Ireland, supports the EMEA region; the center in Singapore supports the Japan, Greater China and Asia-Pacific region; and the centers in Reno, Fargo, and Redmond support North America and Latin America.

We contract most of our manufacturing activities to third parties. Outside manufacturers produce the Xbox, various retail software packaged products, and Microsoft hardware. Our products may include some components that are available from only one or limited sources. Key components that are currently obtained from a single source include the Xbox central processing unit (CPU) from Intel Corporation and the Xbox graphics processing unit (GPU) from NVIDIA Corporation. Similarly, our upcoming Xbox 360 console will also include certain key components that will be supplied at least initially by a single source: the CPU which will be purchased from IBM Corporation and the graphics chips and embedded DRAM chips for the GPU which will be purchased from TSMC and NEC, respectively. Though we have chosen to initially source these key Xbox 360 components from a single supplier, we are under no obligation to exclusively source components from these vendors in the future. Beyond the exceptions noted, we generally have the ability to use other custom manufacturers if the current vendor becomes unavailable. We generally have multiple sources for raw materials, supplies, and components, and are often able to acquire component parts and materials on a volume discount basis.