According to a story in Dow Jones, the President of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division, Robbie Bach, recently sold $6.2 million worth of company stock. This is notable because the company recently offered to extend warranties on all Xbox 360s to three years and take a $1.15 billion hit to its fourth-quarter earnings to account for the system failures.

"In the last couple of months, we started to see significant increases in repair requests ... and significant attention from people," said Robbie Bach during a conference call last week. "So we geared up to respond to that."

A review with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed that Bach's stock sales amounting to $6.2 million happened between May 2 and last Thursday's announcement. The filings showed that the most recent sales happened between May 25 and May 30. The announcement made Microsoft's stock drop only a little, roughly $0.50.

"Robbie Bach's past trading is completely unrelated to last week's announcement," said Microsoft spokesman Eric Hollreiser commenting in Bach's stead "... [He] continues to hold a significant stake in Microsoft and remains confident in the long-term success of the company."

In the two months before the Xbox 360 announcement by Microsoft, Bach was the third in insider-share sales, behind general counsel Brad Smith and chairman and co-founder Bill Gates. While executives often have scheduled sales of stock to help avoid corruption accusations, these sales by Bach were not part of any such schedule.

Ben Silverman, director of research at Indie Research, doesn't think there's any foul play involved, however. "It doesn't necessarily mean [insiders] think that there will be a bad event; it could just be financial planning. But sometimes it just looks bad that an insider has sold stock," said Silverman. "I'd give [Bach] the benefit of the doubt here, especially because the stock didn't move very much [after last week's announcement]."