From someone works in MS Billing (Score 1)

A friend of mine works for the outsourced company Microsoft uses for handling calls and bill related issues. I talked to her about this very issue. I was an original beta tester for Live. My issue was that I set my renewal to Annual (because it's cheaper) and although they renewed me, the next time I went into my dash board it reverted me back to Monthly billing. Now, I'm good until November 2005 but I was annoyed by the fact that the system reverted to a different renewal type and that I am responsible for switching it to annual every year. We talked also about the fact that they did not bill my credit card until December. She said that she was told internally that Microsoft had a problem with some of their servers (probably no big shock to anyone there) and that is why the billing was not done until later. You can think conspiracy all you want, but it's probably more true they had a bug in their software. The bottom line is that it is YOUR reponsibility to indicate, THROUGH YOUR XBOX that you do not want to be renewed etc. It's also your responsibility to keep your email address up to date. While I am no huge MS fan, this was ALL in the agreement you signed up for .... so really, they have done nothing wrong. I am actually surprised they told you that you can get a refund with the whole 60 day thing ... they are actually not obligated to give you a refund at all after you are automatically renewed. Bottom line .... read your agreements and if you don't like them, don't use the service.