Now that we are nearing to the holiday season, Microsoft team is in full swing to get the Xbox One into production. As per latest reports, Microsoft will launch the next generation gaming console on 22 November in one of the 13 initial launch markets–Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, UK, and the USA.

This date is significant in that this is the same date Microsoft first launched the Xbox 360 console way back in 2005.

Microsoft said that the initial pre-order supply for the United States is sold out and Xbox One is the fastest selling console ever released by the company. Microsoft is also making a limited number of additional Xbox One Day One consoles for pre-order in case you missed the earlier boat.

“We have sold out of our pre-order supply in the U.S. faster than at any other time in our history and we are on path to have the biggest launch of an Xbox ever.  We look forward to celebrating with millions and millions of gamers this holiday,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President of Marketing, Strategy and Business, Xbox in an official blog post.

The timing of the launch is critical as rival Sony’s PlayStation 4 will hit the floor in much of the world by one week earlier. The exception is North America, where Sony’s console will be available on 15 November. The releases set up another console war since 2006, when both firms had fresh gaming machines on the market.

It has been an uneasy few months for Microsoft. Let’s look at the some other recent development surrounding the gaming console:

Xbox One development was not rushed

Microsoft’s Major Nelson commented in a post on Reddit, where a user believes that Microsoft has been too hasty with Xbox One and trying to get the first advantage against Sony PlayStation 4.

Nelson said “the Xbox One program has been in development for years, so calling it ‘Rushed’ is incorrect. Did we have a few challenges between May and August? Sure. But we are working on our own schedule – not anyone else’s. At Gamescom, every game in the Xbox booth was running on final Xbox One hardware. Every, Single, One.”

Unfortunately Nelson does not address the issue that some customers have. Many major changes have affected the schedule of Xbox One including the problems surrounding voice recognition and the lack of a launch date. Microsoft announced last month that Xbox One launch had been delayed until 2014 in eight European countries.

“The culmination of many years of listening to you, our fans, developing innovative technology, and partnering with the best game and entertainment partners in the industry has brought us to this point,” Mehdi said. “There is still a lot more work to do, but the teams are making excellent progress and are focused on launch.”

Xbox One CPU gets 150 Mhz boost

Speaking at the Citi Global Technology Conference, Mehdi informed about the performance boost of Xbox One before going into full production. The console will now clock CPU running at 1.75 GHz, 150 MHz increase in base. The development team has increased the CPU from 1.6GHZ to 1.75GHZ, roughly a 10 percent increase in CPU performance. This is on top of the 6% increase we previously announced for the GPU.  The increase in CPU speed means Xbox One will have that much more power for developers to make their games and entertainment really shine.

So why Microsoft didn’t come out straight with increased specs? It would prevent its competitor Sony upgrading their console last minute, so in the long run, Microsoft will be a winner.

One gets thumbs up from publisher

When it comes to listen to the consumer feedback, Microsoft is more open than Sony and other gaming console players. Raptr CEO Dennis Fong says Sony has been closed “almost to the point of ignorance.”

“I think overall Xbox has been way more progressive and open, just in general,” Fong said. “He’d met most of the key people behind Xbox Live, and said Microsoft as a whole tends to be more open, likely as a result of its history in the PC platform. Microsoft also provides Raptr with direct feeds of data to help them streamline the integration of Xbox Live information into the service.”

Fong further added PlayStation on the other hand, has been very, very closed, almost to the point of ignorance, in terms of trying to control every little thing that goes through PlayStation and what their users see. So getting them to release any kind of data, user profile data and such, has been a lot like pulling teeth.

Xbox One negative backlash

Director of Microsoft’s product planning Albert Penello said that Microsoft was surprised by the negative reaction, merely the result of a misunderstanding.

“People got in their minds that what we were trying to do was evil or anti-customer when, in fact, we were looking at what Steam does, we were looking at what iOS is going, we were looking where the customers were going and saying ‘I think we can actually give you a better all-digital experience,” said Penello. “So was I surprised that people had a reaction to it? No. I mean, we knew it was going to be a controversial decision. Was I surprised how negative the reaction was going to be? Yes.”

Microsoft’s already said it plans on re-introducing that sort of thing “when the time is right.” For the most part, Microsoft’s turned the whole thing around, and has managed to get people back on its side; a good thing.