'stuff' Arriving In Uk 22Nd March

[Prometheus]

Excellent! I'll spend my time waiting becoming a master at the game pick-up-sticks, I will school each and every one of you. Great news, thanks for the update!

Confirmed: Pick-up Sticks with online play and high score tables, coming to a Pandora near you.

 

[meva]

It is when everything should be here, including the cases. To be on the safe side we probably won't start until a few days after that.

I feel a lot more confident about this now we are back in control.

Our own assembly line, this will work far far better for batch 2 and so on. It should always have been like this.

presumably you mean all the parts ( all the populated boards,cases,cables ) to manufacture 4000 pandoras ? Or will you still be waiting for more boards from Texas after the 22nd ?
I'm not impatient just curious.

 

[MooTheKow]

To be honest, this seems kind of ridiculous. While I intend to follow this through till the end, I keep getting the impression of things that should have been thought of way ahead of time not being thought of till the last minute. The factory in Texas needed to wait to quote? Why? Hasn't MWeston known how to put these things together for some time now? Why was this change to making things in the UK not figured out quite awhile ago? Couldn't he have sent along information on what needs to be done a few months ago after CE testing was figured out?

+1. So - what on earth was the plan when they were nearly sure these things were going to be shipped out 2 and a half months ago in the middle of december - before they figured out they needed one more round of 'tweaks' to the cases? My BS detector is going off something fierce here.

 

[WizardStan]

Also, I realize that whatever case manufacturer this is in China has worked for some big shops, but they absolutely suck. Whatever happened to "as soon as it's ready we can pump out 10,000 in a week"? They were ready at the beginning of February and it sounds like they haven't gotten a damn thing more done with the Pandora cases to date. March 22nd? Really? That's nearly 3 weeks from now! How inept is this factory that they can't give a proper timeframe ever?

<harsh>Ah, so the problem is you have a poor memory and impossible expectations, and that is Craig's fault.</harsh>
Seriously now, it was never 10'000 in a week, it was always at most 1000 per day. That's 10'000 in two weeks. And they weren't ready the beginning of February, they were apparently ready the 8th of February, but with the approaching holiday it was (wisely) suggested they wait. Yesterday was the first time they could have actually produced any cases. March 1st + 10 working days = shipping sometime around the March 12th weekend, plus a 7-10 day shipping = March 22nd. It couldn't possibly happen any sooner. Well, if they only did 4000 before shipping, it could probably be a week sooner, but that may not be an option.

 

[Sugar_Kane]

So that's 20 days until the "so... it's the 22nd, has work began?!!?" threads start appearing

 

[craigix]

These messages about 'but why didn't you know' 'this is bad management' 'you don't know about manufacturing' is actually your own naivety about the industry.

We were originally estimated a far far lower figure for assembling the units which inexplicably ballooned to over double with no real explanation. Maybe they just don't have time to assemble the units. Maybe they don't want to. Maybe there is more money elsewhere.

This does happen in this industry for any of the above and more reasons.

Who really knows - what I do know though is that it should have always been done here. It makes so much more sense and gives us so much more control.

The whole team is looking forward to this now.

 

[Trey]

We were originally estimated a far far lower figure for assembling the units which inexplicably ballooned to over double with no real explanation.

Their price certainly sounds like a "go away" price.

 

[aliking]

... Yesterday was the first time they could have actually produced any cases. March 1st + 10 working days = shipping sometime around the March 12th weekend, plus a 7-10 day shipping = March 22nd. It couldn't possibly happen any sooner. Well, if they only did 4000 before shipping, it could probably be a week sooner, but that may not be an option.

I like those numbers, but if the factory did start pumping them out yesterday, I think we would have heard EXACTLY that. My policy is: feel free to read anything bad between the lines of what we're told, NEVER read anything good between the lines because therein lies disappointment.

A caveat. If the cases have started being produced, then they know right now whether they will have silkscreen or not. That is a somewhat contentious issue, so they may have not said anything because they don't want to reap the shitstorm of confirming that either way yet.

a

 

[borgqueenx]

yes! Finally! now only 2 months remain!

Seriously? im sure something will go wrong again.

But a question: "the parts will arrive". yes, what parts, only the cases? you have everything else already?

 

[Sphinxter]

These messages about 'but why didn't you know' 'this is bad management' 'you don't know about manufacturing' is actually your own naivety about the industry.

We were originally estimated a far far lower figure for assembling the units which inexplicably ballooned to over double with no real explanation. Maybe they just don't have time to assemble the units. Maybe they don't want to. Maybe there is more money elsewhere.

This does happen in this industry for any of the above and more reasons.

Who really knows - what I do know though is that it should have always been done here. It makes so much more sense and gives us so much more control.

The whole team is looking forward to this now.

Maybe if you actually had a project plan and shared it with everyone and updated it daily like a real project manager these sort of ill feelings and misconceptions would not occur as everyone would know where the milestones and goal posts were and what to expect rather than dripping it out one accidental tweet at a time and keeping them in suspense.

 

[MDave]

Sooo I guess cases are in the middle of mass producing now? Thats good news itself! Should of mentioned it along with this other news of the 'stuff' arriving in the UK 22nd

 

[WizardStan]

A caveat. If the cases have started being produced, then they know right now whether they will have silkscreen or not. That is a somewhat contentious issue, so they may have not said anything because they don't want to reap the shitstorm of confirming that either way yet.

Not necessarily. If this factory is anything at all like the one factory I worked in way back in highschool, they can pop out several pallets of parts over a couple of days before they go to the finishing area. If they pumped a few out yesterday, they might silkscreen them today, send pictures to MWeston who confirms them, and then they start silk screening them tomorrow at a slightly faster rate than the mould can produce them.

 

[Cloudef]

I hope it finally works out :/ There is no similar device in market currently, and I'd really need one. The GPU could be a bit better after these 2 years. The other Specs are fine, as there haven't been quite big changes, not for small companies at least.

But for now it looks like that, I'll wait for the Pandora until new similar device comes out with gaming controls, touchscreen and qwerty keyboard. I'll understand that you've had hard time doing this and you all are a bit unexperienced, but thats how it is and thats why you shouldn't over do it. Pandora is made by small team and it by no means should not be "professional", only the way it works is important. And it seems you've got that part right. Right software, no closed sh*t and also great controls.

As for the Chinese, I think the situation was bit over exaggerated, it looked a bit more like communication problem where people just get fed up when they don't understand correctly or so..

 

[WizardStan]

Maybe if you actually had a project plan and shared it with everyone and updated it daily like a real project manager these sort of ill feelings and misconceptions would not occur as everyone would know where the milestones and goal posts were and what to expect rather than dripping it out one accidental tweet at a time and keeping them in suspense.

HAH, that is the funniest thing I've ever heard. There are two types of project managers: the ones that update daily, causing at least one hour per day of lost production and often more, and then wonder why their project is falling behind; and those that set the project plan and then disappear, or get annoyed when you ask them for updates, or bother them with your petty problems, and so help you if you can't keep to the schedule because of something totally out of your control, especially if it was something he could have helped with if you had just told him there was a problem.
Which kind of manager do you think Craig would be?

 

[benji_stein]

@Craigix
My question: I thought we had an arrangement with the case company to send out the first 1000 cases when they were ready:
http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=154

Therefore, to be on the safe side, they will probably do 1000 cases and ship them to the assembly factory.

Why are they not still doing this? The "assembly factory" is just now near Craig, instead of Texas. As the post says:

Assembling and testing will take a while anyways, there will not be much time between the time when the first 1000 are finished and the next cases will be ready to ship.

So it seems like if we could send 1000 cases to arrive the week before March 22nd, assembly could already be well underway (~1000, even), by the time the remaining ones have arrived. You just need to get the first 1000 boards/screens from Texas by then (those are already all done, right?), which shouldn't be a problem since that shipping is usually faster than the shipping from China.

Note that I don't mean this as an attack or disagreement in any way; I'm just wondering why we think it's suddenly OK for them to renege on yet another one of the mould company's promises.

 

[Monk]

The factory in Texas needed to wait to quote? Why? Hasn't MWeston known how to put these things together for some time now? Why was this change to making things in the UK not figured out quite awhile ago? Couldn't he have sent along information on what needs to be done a few months ago after CE testing was figured out?

Well, this is the story as we're told it, yes. It does seem ludicrous that OpenPandora would wait until now to get a quote for something so vital (or, well, anything really "at this late stage") but it's either believe that level of... um... behaviour or go digging around for conspiracy theories. I have my own of those, but they're MINE! You can't have!

 

[RajTakhar]

check this out

The current project I am designing has

1 project for it vendor (my company)
1 project manager for software vendor (software vendor 1)
1 Tech Lead who spends more time acting as a project leader (software vendor 2)
1 Customer project manager
1 customer project manager - manager who also thinks he is still project manager
1 old customer project manager - manager - which thinks he is project managing everyone

Thats x 6 project managers

against x3 technical leads/designers

you can imagine what my daily meetings are about - not actualy real targets - just targets about targets about targets - yep you do feel like walking out on endless cycle of target discussions, I spend more time discussing shit than designing

 

[Locri]

Also, I realize that whatever case manufacturer this is in China has worked for some big shops, but they absolutely suck. Whatever happened to "as soon as it's ready we can pump out 10,000 in a week"? They were ready at the beginning of February and it sounds like they haven't gotten a damn thing more done with the Pandora cases to date. March 22nd? Really? That's nearly 3 weeks from now! How inept is this factory that they can't give a proper timeframe ever?

<harsh>Ah, so the problem is you have a poor memory and impossible expectations, and that is Craig's fault.</harsh>
Seriously now, it was never 10'000 in a week, it was always at most 1000 per day. That's 10'000 in two weeks. And they weren't ready the beginning of February, they were apparently ready the 8th of February, but with the approaching holiday it was (wisely) suggested they wait. Yesterday was the first time they could have actually produced any cases. March 1st + 10 working days = shipping sometime around the March 12th weekend, plus a 7-10 day shipping = March 22nd. It couldn't possibly happen any sooner. Well, if they only did 4000 before shipping, it could probably be a week sooner, but that may not be an option.

Nonsense, my memory is fine. Ok, so I slipped up saying 10,000 in a week but it still was about 1,000 per day which means at 5,000 in a week which would be the full case load for the first batch of Pandoras. I will apologize about that little slip up, but the base fact that from everything we've been told OVER AND OVER again it should only take a week to produce the cases once the it was green-lighted. I didn't say the cases were ready before the beginning of Feb, I said at the beginning (which was close enough to the 8th that I assumed I wouldn't have to be so specific, but if you want super-exact specifics I can do that as well). At first we were told that as long as we gave a go-ahead before Feb 8th everything would be fine. Then that devolved into "well, they'll do as many cases as they can" which of course devolved into "nothing got shipped" and judging by how long it'll take the factory to get the cases sounds an awful lot like "we didn't bother doing anything for this company whose cases have been delayed over and over again despite promising otherwise". Now not only is it the week to produce the 4,000 cases but it's also whatever time is involved in finishing the cases where that was repeatedly ignored in previous discussions up until things that happened around Feb 8th.

These messages about 'but why didn't you know' 'this is bad management' 'you don't know about manufacturing' is actually your own naivety about the industry.

We were originally estimated a far far lower figure for assembling the units which inexplicably ballooned to over double with no real explanation. Maybe they just don't have time to assemble the units. Maybe they don't want to. Maybe there is more money elsewhere.

So you're saying it wasn't naive to expect the cases would be a simple thing to do? You're saying it's not naive to not do research into Asian manufacturing processes and relying on what the company is saying without having a translator to ensure good communications from the get go? You're saying it's not naive to constantly release dates which in hindsight seem completely unrealistic rather than at least honestly saying "we don't know"? And that the fact that most of the news updates about what is actually going on is spread out in vague, sometimes unrelated posts in snippet form that gets digested into an unofficial blog?

I can understand someone admitting that lots of things went wrong and they'll try their best to do better next time and learn from it. I'm ok with that, mistakes happen. It's how we learn and grow as humans. But to say that the OPT hasn't been rather naive about parts of the process only to get smacked down repeatedly by delays that they hadn't anticipated because of lack of previous knowledge about the process is lame. I'm not blaming it all on OPT, you've had some horrible luck and there is no denying that. That said, there is a reason that the "two more months" meme is so prevalent and has pretty much borne out every single time.

And don't mistake me. I'm not some crazy that thinks the Pandora is vaporware. I trust that the OPT is doing exactly what they say they are and it looks like a fantastic console and I look forward to working on it in the future. And that's probably why this irritates me so is because the anticipation has built up since the pre-order to a ridiculous level. But seriously, from the outside view it looks like there have been several delays that have been caused by the mis-management of the project, not just random crap that happened.

I sincerely hope that nothing else goes wrong between now and the time that it gets released and I've held my tongue so very very long about this, but at this point it's hard to not express some disappointment in how things have gone.

Edit: I forgot to add: The factory gave you a quote and then reneged and gave you a higher quote? I agree with the others that this sounds like a "go away" quote. This information at least sounds better than the previous impression given which was "we finally got a quote and it was way high, so we are changing things yet again".

 

[MooTheKow]

These messages about 'but why didn't you know' 'this is bad management' 'you don't know about manufacturing' is actually your own naivety about the industry.

We were originally estimated a far far lower figure for assembling the units which inexplicably ballooned to over double with no real explanation. Maybe they just don't have time to assemble the units. Maybe they don't want to. Maybe there is more money elsewhere.

This does happen in this industry for any of the above and more reasons.

Who really knows - what I do know though is that it should have always been done here. It makes so much more sense and gives us so much more control.

The whole team is looking forward to this now.

Everything is always someone else's fault, isn't it? It'd be much easier to believe if the blame didn't always fall on someone else's shoulders for every single thing that has gone wrong the last year and a half. Just once I'd like to see you actually apologize for doing something wrong instead of laying the blame elsewhere and then criticizing those of us who are unhappy about it.

 

[MrBlais]

To be fair, I think Craig is just as excited to get this little bastard to his customers as we are to hold it in our little, impatient hands. Leave it be, guys..