benji_stein
Member
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2007
- Messages
- 278
OK, I feel the need to chime in here. I've got a bunch of statements/questions, and I don't feel like quoting all the relevant sources, since I'm too tired/busy with other stuff going on right now.
1) Trey - thanks for your work, pictures, report, and promise of continued effort.
2) Timstertoo - I couldn't agree more with your post.
3) My suspicion - the reason they delayed the appointment last week was because they only had the 200 we saw in the last photos, and were frantically making the extra 300 to make the 500 that Trey saw. So, in my estimate, that's 300/week that they can do.
4) ED, I know you don't lie to us, and I really appreciate that. But sometimes you're just too nice. As some people have said, when a company like CC is jerking you around, you have to put your foot down harder and bug the hell out of them. If we'd been riding them harder, we might have had the truth, and then we wouldn't have been misled, even if it was an unintentional misleading, and the truth as far as you knew it (with appropriate caveats). Honestly, I don't blame you for telling us what you had been told. However, I do think you could have done a better job at uncovering the truth, once you started to suspect them.
People here have been clamoring for someone (and offering) to visit CC for months (a year?) now. Why did this take so long? If you had doubts, it's a benefit. Even if you weren't sure about your doubts, it couldn't hurt. I hate to say "I told you so", but I expressed some doubts at your optimism a week or two ago, and your response was "what other setbacks could we have"?
5) What's been their (CEO's) response when we pointed out their flagrant lie? Because it wasn't just a "little white lie" of "Yes, dear, I think your product will do fabulously", it was a giant whopper of "Yeah, we're almost done" when they had barely even started. How on earth can you (ED) say "If they now start working properly, I don't see a problem."??
Honesty is critical in a business relationship, and I personally think their lying was completely unacceptable. Not doing the boards (as has been said) would have been understandable. Unless you guys can get some kind of contract that guarantees penalties if they don't perform, or TI manages to give some reasonable explanation, you should drop them like a hot potato as soon as the replacement company has pumped out a few hundred boards, or CC finishes up their 3000 left, whichever happens first.
6) Link - I agree with you that there are a lot of other guilty parties around here, including the banks and case company (We need a new acronym, CC is now CircuitCo). In particular, there really should be some compensation from the Nub Manufacturer, who - while doing a good job at fixing their royal screw-up - were grossly incompetent at not properly (at all?) testing the nubs to make sure that they were up to spec. That issue alone has delayed this whole ordeal by at least 6 months. However, please don't say that the board company doesn't have a fair share of fault right now. They promised (so they say) they could put about 2000 nubs a week onto Pandora boards. If CC had those boards ready to go (as they'd told us) they could have soldered on the 2k nubs they had last week, and shipped them to OPT, only to wait on the next set of nubs. As it stands, we're instead limited by their (supposed; rate yet to be proven) 500 boards/week, which will (almost certainly) be less than half of the speed they'd be able to do if they made the boards as promised. So while they're not the only (or biggest) delaying factor, and some of their reasons may even be understandable, please don't try to tell me that things wouldn't be going any faster if they *had* done what they told us they did.
And finally, two questions I haven't seen anywhere else:
7) Speaking of Nubs, What's the status on those PCBs? You said that the company has gotten another thousand or so of them in (I can't find the exact number ATM), but that's a fair bit from the number they need for the rest of the Pandoras/ICPs. When will they be getting in the rest of them?
8) What's the status of the TV Cables?
1) Trey - thanks for your work, pictures, report, and promise of continued effort.
2) Timstertoo - I couldn't agree more with your post.
3) My suspicion - the reason they delayed the appointment last week was because they only had the 200 we saw in the last photos, and were frantically making the extra 300 to make the 500 that Trey saw. So, in my estimate, that's 300/week that they can do.
4) ED, I know you don't lie to us, and I really appreciate that. But sometimes you're just too nice. As some people have said, when a company like CC is jerking you around, you have to put your foot down harder and bug the hell out of them. If we'd been riding them harder, we might have had the truth, and then we wouldn't have been misled, even if it was an unintentional misleading, and the truth as far as you knew it (with appropriate caveats). Honestly, I don't blame you for telling us what you had been told. However, I do think you could have done a better job at uncovering the truth, once you started to suspect them.
People here have been clamoring for someone (and offering) to visit CC for months (a year?) now. Why did this take so long? If you had doubts, it's a benefit. Even if you weren't sure about your doubts, it couldn't hurt. I hate to say "I told you so", but I expressed some doubts at your optimism a week or two ago, and your response was "what other setbacks could we have"?
5) What's been their (CEO's) response when we pointed out their flagrant lie? Because it wasn't just a "little white lie" of "Yes, dear, I think your product will do fabulously", it was a giant whopper of "Yeah, we're almost done" when they had barely even started. How on earth can you (ED) say "If they now start working properly, I don't see a problem."??
Honesty is critical in a business relationship, and I personally think their lying was completely unacceptable. Not doing the boards (as has been said) would have been understandable. Unless you guys can get some kind of contract that guarantees penalties if they don't perform, or TI manages to give some reasonable explanation, you should drop them like a hot potato as soon as the replacement company has pumped out a few hundred boards, or CC finishes up their 3000 left, whichever happens first.
6) Link - I agree with you that there are a lot of other guilty parties around here, including the banks and case company (We need a new acronym, CC is now CircuitCo). In particular, there really should be some compensation from the Nub Manufacturer, who - while doing a good job at fixing their royal screw-up - were grossly incompetent at not properly (at all?) testing the nubs to make sure that they were up to spec. That issue alone has delayed this whole ordeal by at least 6 months. However, please don't say that the board company doesn't have a fair share of fault right now. They promised (so they say) they could put about 2000 nubs a week onto Pandora boards. If CC had those boards ready to go (as they'd told us) they could have soldered on the 2k nubs they had last week, and shipped them to OPT, only to wait on the next set of nubs. As it stands, we're instead limited by their (supposed; rate yet to be proven) 500 boards/week, which will (almost certainly) be less than half of the speed they'd be able to do if they made the boards as promised. So while they're not the only (or biggest) delaying factor, and some of their reasons may even be understandable, please don't try to tell me that things wouldn't be going any faster if they *had* done what they told us they did.
And finally, two questions I haven't seen anywhere else:
7) Speaking of Nubs, What's the status on those PCBs? You said that the company has gotten another thousand or so of them in (I can't find the exact number ATM), but that's a fair bit from the number they need for the rest of the Pandoras/ICPs. When will they be getting in the rest of them?
8) What's the status of the TV Cables?
