As a person with exactly zero interest in the Pandora one way or another (no pre-order, no order, no interest, no intention to buy):
Vorporeal said:
The first place where people are losing perspective is that they forget that their financial contribution to the project pales in comparison to the financial contributions from the team members.
I don't think people are saying they are in control - they are just being consumers. I don't give money to companies that mess me around, and it seems that other people are of the same opinion. Customers are the most important part of any business because without them you don't have a business. I think that OP have been too open and that's caused them a lot of trouble with people that don't understand normal business practices but unfortunately, I think it's only creating a rod for your own back by suggesting that they alone are in control. If the product isn't what the customers want, they will cancel pre-orders and not buy the product. It's a compromise - every customer *is* a stakeholder (maybe not in the legal sense, but in the sense that they have a "stake" in the business's future) in the same way, whether they pre-order or not.
And the financial problems of a company that you are dealing with who hold your money on the promise of a future delivery are very much every customer's concern, too. That's part of the problem, I feel. At the end of the day, though, whether someone has put in more money or not into the Pandora doesn't matter to 99.9% of their customers - every person has something at stake and every person has an agreed amount of money paid for an agreed product. How they get there is the company's problem, not the consumer. I don't care when a company tells me they have problems - we have a "contract" (including offer and acceptance and sometimes even as far as an exchange of funds) and how they fulfill it isn't my problem. This is why I don't care when a company posts me a product and it doesn't arrive, or they have to accept returned stock and sell it as "B-Grade" items... that's not my problem, as a customer I just want my end of the contract fulfilled. And that contract does *not* have to be written on paper - offer and acceptance are enough to form a contract.
That's no reflection on the current situation (again, I don't care, I just find these forum posts entertaining), just the way business works.
Vorporeal said:
If the delays get so bad that we reach critical cancellation mass and the project collapses, the team goes bankrupt. Kaput. They're financially FUCKED.
Personally, this would be my biggest worry if I was a "stakeholder" in any fashion. However, it's not accurate that the team goes bankrupt. They are a private limited company, registered separately from the other businesses operating at the same address. If OP Ltd. goes bust, the OP team lose any of their money still in the company, yes, but they aren't made personally bankrupt. There would be nothing to stop the directors of the company, say, employing the other members for their other companies and continuing business, or just letting OP Ltd. die and everyone carrying on as normal (and thus letting the creditors and customers fight over OP's carcass). A limited company has limited liability and thus it would be up to a court to prove that OP Ltd.'s officers acted negligently in order to seek any form of further action (e.g. personal bankruptcy, fraud charges, etc.) and there are more than enough factors in operation to make a legitimate cause that OP Ltd's ventures just failed due to bad luck (factory problems, global economy, pre-order cancellations, lack of further investment etc.). If OP Ltd. dies, the customers get bugger-all, they may or may not get a refund on their credit cards, the factories go unpaid, and everyone fights over what money *is* left, with the largest debts probably being paid first (i.e. the factories, etc.). Insurance probably exists for the factory's payments but I would be highly doubtful about whether it covers individual customers and their pre-orders. Bankruptcy courts can and do take all the money they have and give it to the largest creditors first. They could even screw over "employed staff" of OP Ltd. and not pay them, but even the staff would be paid before the customers who pre-ordered.
And if this happened? Well, (unless someone could prove deliberate foul play) the company directors wouldn't be able to lose more than their initial money inserted into the business (i.e. no more than they've already "lost") and would be free to continue running their own businesses, working, selling products etc. maybe even buying up the carcass of OP Ltd. and their bankrupt stock (though that would attract regulatory attention, I assume). And their other businesses would be completely unaffected. Maybe a bank or two wouldn't like seeing that on some company director's credit report next time one of their businesses needs money but it would hardly be crippling. And the customers? They'd get nothing delivered, would have to fight creditors and their credit card companies in order to get a refund (God help those that didn't pay by credit card) and would probably lose out in that the money returned wouldn't be the equivalent of the money invested, even if we're only talking about inflation.
I think that's a *real* concern here, whether or not it would ever actually happen. *That's* why I don't pre-order anything. That's why I don't buy from furniture shops unless they have the sofa I want in stock to take away today. That's why I don't pay a company each week to get a hamper at Christmas. People worrying about whether or not their Pandora will be sprayed or not should take a look at the wider picture.
I'm not saying that I think it will happen, I'm not saying that OP are "evil guys" (hell, the above could happen completely by accident, bad luck, etc. no matter what the company did to try to recover itself), I'm just saying that you don't know about the finances of OP Ltd. and that's a risk. Even banks can collapse, as we've seen recently. The fact that OP Ltd is registered as a separate company means that it won't be "bouyed up" by income from any other companies that the company directors may own. It's an independent entity and at any time the shareholders / directors are only liable for the amount of money that they put into the business themselves already. Everyone else (even the people who answer the phones, talk to the factories etc.) is at risk, even if they are earning a wage from OP Ltd. It was quite common in the 80's and 90's for videogames companies to repeatedly go broke and for the staff to move on to their successors, form their own company with the same employees or just be left owed money. Look at any of the ZX Spectrum-era software houses and follow their history on Wikipedia - a lot of them went bankrupt, neared bankruptcy, were bought out, moved on, etc. The projects were abandoned, the staff were laid off (sometimes owing money), and next week a new company formed by the same people from the bankrupt company would start up, find investment and repeat the cycle.
*That* would be my worry. Not what colour the cases are.
Vorporeal said:
From a mathematical perspective, this essentially means that every day they don't ship, they're losing money. I'm sure they're not stringing us along to turn it into a drinking game.
Now please tie that in with the above.
I don't want to be a doom-merchant but that's why I wouldn't ever pre-order something like this, no matter the history of other companies run by the same people. If OP was produced under another, well-established, profitable company's banner then, yes, that's a bit of security - even if it "failed", the other business ventures would soak up the losses. When Nintendo loses money because their product flops or their costs soar, nobody cares because they know that the company's other ventures and ideas and previous products and future plans are big enough to bouy them up. But when it's an independent entity struggling to produce a highly-complex, state-of-the-art, unique product in a tough patent-heavy marketplace, with almost zero experience of doing so, few staff, uncertain knowledge of the requirements of a lot of the tasks, taking shortcuts all the time, experiencing problems at every stage, cutting through every deadline, having simple communications problems, having to seek pre-order money to help finance what's so far been a total loss (financially speaking) - and that was to fund the first batch which may or may not pay for itself when it comes, nobody really knows for sure because surprises are around every corner - then you have a serious risk to consider. It may well pay off. It may not. But delays, expenses, mistakes, etc. do not inspire more confidence. And all the time, the market is being sipped away by customer-doubt, competitors, etc. not to mention bank charges, overheads, etc. that must now be twice or three times what was originally budgeted for based on a roughly 1-year production window. They may still all be inside a safe window or not, but only a handful of people can know for sure.
For me, the actual killers (not that I would pre-order anyway, or order this particular device) were: Not checking things like how FCC/EC certification worked. Not having decent communication links with suppliers (and not drafting contracts with those suppliers that lets you kick them up the bum if they don't perform, and/or not executing those clauses). Registering as a separate company right from the first word, and not piggybacking on another very-closely-related venture that *is* (I assume) profitable. Asking for pre-orders. Failing to check simple things like PayPal's policy on pre-orders, etc. (I would assume that the other related businesses would have come across and checked this information years previously). Allowing over a year of competitive advantage to catch up with the designs - that could have been a year of exclusivity in the market. Taking things to trade-shows etc. that you can't deliver - it just leaves a bad taste in the mouths of all the people who *are* interested in the product. Forum censorship also irked me a little, especially because I can't tell what *has* been censored.
I'm an open-source nut, and loved the original idea of an independent British-supported device that I might be able to buy and program. The good tastes of that have mostly gone but there was always too much risk here for me, and that's what other people are worried about. That's why the concern over delays - it's not "Give me the device because I can't program / prototype without it", it's "Give me the device because I want it in my hands before anything else goes wrong". I think people have a right to be suspicious and keen to just get their hands on the raw materials at least, so they have some of what they paid for. And there is such a thing as keeping the customer interested - PR has been laughable at times (weeks without any word when the last official statement left uncertainty about major items, etc.).
I can quite understand why a lot of people have "lost perspective". Confidence is wonderful for those who are secure in their knowledge - confidence without knowledge, though, is just blind faith. Some people are okay with that, some people aren't. I don't think there's anything specific that the OP team can do to remedy such things, it all seems either pretty obvious or pretty unavoidable because of the roads they've chosen. However, to suggest that other people shouldn't air their dissatisfaction is a bit of a crock - these people have money tied up in a venture that isn't turning out the way it was originally painted. And yes, they can cancel at any time, and lots do. But the point is, for those still in the queues - every person that cancels is a lost sale, one that finances your even getting a product at the end, and the people cancelling (who *were* customers) are stating some good reasons for them doing so. That should be a concern for everybody. And all of that is bad PR - it only takes a ONE-inch sideline column in any of the same magazines that are publishing stories about Pandora to seed doubt in thousands of potential customers. That one-inch can come from anything as small as "concerns were expressed about the projects future on the official forums" or "customers queries went unanswered for several days" or even just "the project is now a year late".
Customer dissatisfaction is a slippery slope, and most people forget that *potential* customers are the most important kind - without them you won't have any more customers. Some actions, decisions, announcements, attitudes, etc. are affecting the number of *customers*. What is that doing to the number of *potential* customers too?
Confidence is all good, and I sincerely hope that a good Linux-based open-source handheld does eventually appear on the British market. The trouble is, though, that as time goes on, it's looking less and less likely to be the Pandora.
