That's not why the world financial crisis has happened.
This isn't one lie. This isn't like telling a costumer you have all their parts ready when you don't, then rushing around to get them finished before they notice. This is (at least) four months straight of lying.
I don't know what industry you work in, but in any of that the industries the company I work for supplies, this definitely wouldn't fly.
Lets say Maytag asks some company to make a fancy gizmo to put in their washing machines. That company will have engineers design it, and make prints for each of the individual parts. If that company comes to us to make parts for them and we say "yeah, we'll have all the parts you need in four months", they'll tell Maytag that they'll have gizmos dropping off the assembly line in four months. And in the mean time they'll start setting up equipment, ordering parts from other suppliers, and possibly hiring additional staff. But not looking for and setting up contracts with alternative suppliers for the parts we're supposed to be making, because every time they check in we say "yeah, were making them right now, we've got a pile of them right here in the shop". So if after four months, when they're ready to start producing after pouring piles of money into this project, we say, "Just kidding, we didn't really make your parts", then like I said, all hell would break loose.
Look at a car. It has thousands of parts from suppliers all of the world, yet auto companies keep churning them out, with out ridiculous two years delays. Do you really think that would be possible if the companies involved did this kind of thing "all the time"?
So no, this kind of thing doesn't happen all the time. It's rare, and when it does happen, it's a very big deal. Actually the fact that this is so ridiculous is why I have doubts that it actually happened the way it's been reported here (that and it appears ED is getting all his information second hand). CircuitCo is a a little company in Texas, competing in a market dominated by cheap Asian manufactures, I have a hard time believing they would have survived this long if they made a habit of this kind of behavior.
If OPT isn't 100% certain that everything they posted so far is absolutely true, then they need to do some serious damage control. The first step would be deleting both of these threads, and word-filtering "CircuitCo". That may seem pretty drastic, but libel is pretty serious.
On the other hand if everything ED has posted here is true, then I see no reason to call anything other than what it is. They lied. If putting that out there loses them business, then I guess that's a few less struggling companies whose trust they can betray.
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I've been following this project for a long time. From long before I started posting, and before the first batch of preorders even started. I saw all the delays and setbacks, but I really wanted it to succeed because I liked what OPT was trying to do. When Craig was asking for investors, I offered to invest $3000, because I wanted to help make this happen. But with this latest turn of events, this is the first time I thought this project was most likely going to fail before this even finishing the first batch.
Not that this setback was much worse than the others, it isn't. The problem is that it's the same setback. Save for natural disasters, it's always been suppliers not living up to their own claims, jerking them around, or just generally saying one thing and doing another. Yet OPT reactions is always to push the deadline back Two Months and keep down the same path. How much did the antics of the case manufacture alone set this project back? Yet they're still the sole suppliers of Pandora cases.
A little over two years ago, my boss, and the owner of the company, made a really bad business decision. And as a result we went from two shops and 20 employees, to the middle of last year when he was working alone in a shop with everyone else laid off. This year was the second best year in the history of the company. That's how you run a business. You learn from your mistakes, and you course correct. You don't just keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Well that was a lot of words. If you made it this far, then I commend you on your attention span, but I would suggest better reading material. If you didn't, well, then I guess you aren't reading this. As I said in another thread I'm no longer interested in investing money in this project. But, I also don't think I should invest anymore of my time in watching its "progress", so I think I'm done with this site. If one day I, or my children, or my children's children happen to get an email confirming a Pandora shipment, then great. If not, oh well.
ED, thanks again for replacing my LCD cable when my Pandora wasn't under warranty, and wasn't even bought from your store. Stay golden.
