Trying to find a fair solution

Read the post. Does this sound like a fair solution?

  • Yes (I'm not in Craigs Queue)

    Votes: 46 54.1%
  • Yes (I'm in Craigs Queue)

    Votes: 33 38.8%
  • No (if possible, let me know why)

    Votes: 6 7.1%

  • Total voters
    85

In my opinion, the important thing here is that ED should be able to finally stop having to think about how to clean up the past (Craig's mess)
This is not helping, saying it's craig's mess, because it isn't his fault only. I almost feel sorry for craig, he most be so paranoid by now (beyond even).
 Yes and no.

It's not Craigs fault that CC fucked up the PCBs.

It's also not Craigs fault that the Chinese company took so long to create the case.

It IS Craigs fault that he told me and everyone else in 2008 that the unit is completely finished and ready for production.

It IS Craigs fault that he spent the money he took for the 1GHz Pandoras elsewhere, knowing he had to pay production costs for those.

It IS Craigs fault that he promised to raise sales for the 1GHz unit with excessive marketing and did nothing at all.

It IS Craigs fault that he told me he has 800 Preorders left and after enough money and / or Pandoras for refunds / delivery to be down to 150, he still has over 500 left.

It IS Craigs fault that he doesn't really try to help out here and seems to not care about his customers anymore.

It IS Craigs fault that he hasn't learned anything at all (if you take a look at how the iControlPad2 was)

It IS Craigs fault that he decided to not sell the WIZ or Caanoo and basically closed down his well-visited shop because he saw the WIZ was competition to the Pandora (he even tried to force ME to stop selling it... thank god I never did).

Yes, I can fully understand there is heavy weight on his shoulders.

But the same weight was (and a lot of it still is) on my shoulders - and I'm not giving up.

The community is very very helpful, if he would approach them openly, it will do everything it can to help out.

After all that happened, NO one here says Craig had bad intentions. If someone says it's a scam, everyone defends him, because everyone KNEW what happened.

It's not the bad luck that happened with the production, it's the misinformation and false numbers he told the ones trying to help him out, instead of being open for getting help.
 
Yes you have to chalk the survey as another misinformation - The price slots etc where put forward on the basis of what was believed to be the remaining queue.

ED tried repeatedly to get the remaining queue information but only received it AFTER the survey, as in very recently.

That is why it's now apparent that we can't just proceed as we are and have to draw a line in the sand. Yes it sucks but options are running out.
 
 It's nice from you to help but how that "solution" can be called fair toward people who received their pandora years ago without adding any money or versus the people who just paid 150euros last month?
Addition after some consideration:

This isn't really a poll about whether a solution is fair between remaining queuers. Much less between them and those who already got a Pandora.

This is a poll about whether the solution is fair between you and ED.

And the scale is quite heavily tipped from the start considering the fact ED has no obligation toward you whatsoever, he's just the after-party-cleaner and a volunteer one at that and you could even say he wasn't invited to the party as such!

I don't see much difference between what was and what's offered now. Will the survey results still be used and pandoras send for 200/150/100€? I'm willing to pay €200 ex. vat. instead of the €150 I did in the survey but cannot afford €300 ex vat at the moment, maybe later.
I thought this is a replacement to the survey.

In any case, this is at least a final conclusion; no more "maybe it comes one day, maybe not". Once this gets decided we know.

That's what was meant by the zombie thread too.
 
As people have said it's not 'fair' in any real way but it does sound like the best solution if you don't have any help from OP Ltd (Craig).

If you could answer the following it might help with advice + suggestions :

1) When you say Craig has 500+ outstanding pre orders do you mean he has given you 500+ responses to the survey. Or is there a category in the data that Craig has given you that says something like 'this person has a pre order but did not respond to the survey'?

2) What has Craig offered / been requested to do in terms of supplying his customers with Pandoras?

3) If OP GmbH provide a Pandora for a customer of OP Ltd after taking the €300 or €100 then who is responsible for the cost of repairs under warranty?

4) Are your investors happy with your suggested solution? From my perspective the considerations of your investors should come before the needs of Craigs customers. If OP GmbH are responsible for warranties then I suspect you'll be selling at a loss for €300 / €100 when the cost of shipping & supply of carry cases, spare batteries etc. & future repairs under warranty are considered.

5) When you say : 'All ordered Pandora items like Carry Case, Battery, Stylus, etc. will be included for free' Does this include TV Out cables?

______________________________________

Best of luck and many thanks for staying on this sinking ship (OP Ltd) to try and save the passengers whilst apparently the captain grabbed the first lifeboat he could find and sailed off into the sunset the moment the iceberg was struck.
 
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I thought this is a replacement to the survey.
Just a quick info about that:

It is NO replacement. I will still keep the survey results and follow those as good as possible, but I will point out that it's highly unlikely that everyone will get a unit in a reasonable time if ever.

So everyone who is ABLE to afford that upgrade price and is willing to support what we're doing here (despite his unlucky experience with Craig) should do it.

Maybe someone has a rich uncle who would like to donate 150K EUR for this project, then you'd all get the unit right away, but I wouldn't bet on it. ;)
 
1) When you say Craig has 500+ outstanding pre orders do you mean he has given you 500+ responses to the survey. Or is there a category in the data that Craig has given you that says something like 'this person has a pre order but did not respond to the survey'?
The survey had 489 customers (AFAIR), but there are probably a lot of customers who didn't fill out the survey, so there's probably more remaining...

2) What has Craig offered / been requested to do in terms of supplying his customers with Pandoras?
Nothing really. I requested that he uses the CC PCBs I repaired for free to supply them to the customers who chose to get a CC unit. 

3) If OP GmbH provide a Pandora for a customer of OP Ltd after taking the €300 or €100 then who is responsible for the cost of repairs under warranty?
 
Legally, Craigs order will be cancelled and I will sell the unit for a discounted price, so I will be responsible for that.

4) Are your investors happy with your suggested solution? From my perspective the considerations of your investors should come before the needs of Craigs customers. If OP GmbH are responsible for warranties then I suspect you'll be selling at a loss for €300 / €100 when the cost of shipping & supply of carry cases, spare batteries etc. & future repairs under warranty are considered.
We've got an internal area about that, but I didn't get many replies from the investors yet.

However, luckily, not many Pandoras need repairs. Out of 2800 I delivered so far, I got about 100 back for repairs.

That's why the price is a bit higher than mere production costs, as a safety belt. 

5) When you say : 'All ordered Pandora items like Carry Case, Battery, Stylus, etc. will be included for free' Does this include TV Out cables?
Yes. It would just be too complicated to add another upgrade queue for all those items or even the TV Out Cables.

I checked how many actually ordered these items and it would work out.

Best of luck and many thanks for staying on this sinking ship (OP Ltd) to try and save the passengers whilst apparently the captain grabbed the first lifeboat he could find and sailed off into the sunset the moment the iceberg was struck.
I wouldn't be able to do it with the huge support from the community I got, thanks to all of you :)
 
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Is it possible to include a general "discount system" in the shop for all that have already bought a Pandora from you when they wish to obtain a 1Ghz unit? Like a discount for loyal customers? (like my barbershop has :p )

This might help for people like me who will never sell their CC unit but for whom a 1Ghz unit would seem far easier to self-convince to get if the price started with a 4 :D
 
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Is it possible to include a general "discount system" in the shop for all that have already bought a Pandora from you when they wish to obtain a 1Ghz unit? Like a discount for loyal customers? (like my barbershop has :p )

This might help for people like me who will never sell their CC unit but for whom a 1Ghz unit would seem far easier to self-convince to get if the price started with a 4 :D
I want to lower the price anyways when this is all being dealt with, so this shouldn't be a big deal.
 
I thought this is a replacement to the survey.
Just a quick info about that:


It is NO replacement. I will still keep the survey results and follow those as good as possible, but I will point out that it's highly unlikely that everyone will get a unit in a reasonable time if ever.


So everyone who is ABLE to afford that upgrade price and is willing to support what we're doing here (despite his unlucky experience with Craig) should do it.


Maybe someone has a rich uncle who would like to donate 150K EUR for this project, then you'd all get the unit right away, but I wouldn't bet on it. ;)
This is not a question as much as a sidenote...

ED, I honestly have to wonder "why". You have no obligation there. Yes, you wrote on the forums that as soon as the LCD:s arrive, the 200 euro upgraders and some 150 euro upgraders will get their units. But this was before the full list was given to you. The size of the full list negates any obligation you feel you might have. Do the "chosen" 150 even know who they are...

It is obvious that the donations are used to clear this everlasting queue, but at least cut the amount of your profits you use? This queue is a lost cause. And the more people have incentive to upgrade, the quicker we get rid of it. When you get to the 100 queue I have a feeling you'll have nasty competition from eBay making sales for new units. It will be even worse for rebirths.

I guess it's easy for me to say, because I've already decided I'll take one or the other of the upgrades... Enough of this bull already...
 
ED, you sound like there are no stocks, but only parts ready to assemble when units are bought ...

Are there rebirth pandoras in stock, or do they need to be produced ?

Out of curiosity, how many of these parts do you have :

- 1ghz motherboards

- Rebirth motherboards

- cases (I never understood, were all of the inital black cases sold ?)
 
So the questions were designed when there was 150 units and not 500.
sorry, but that is not a valid excuse, even if ED had no solid number we've been knowing for months that there were around 500 (take or give 100) units in the limbo...
Not really - Craig has never really given exact numbers, and the "estimates" he occasionally gave on this board or on IRC were wildly fluctuating. As far as I recall, his most recent estimate (months before the survey) was "a few hundred", whatever that means. Meanwhile, ED has kept shipping units to Craig's pre-orderers, so the number should have gone down since that a lot. Of course knowing Craig, one could speculate that "a few hundred" doesn't mean 200 or 300 but rather 600 or so, but you cannot plan things based on wild speculation on how to interpret phrases like "a few hundred".

The only thing ED could work with were the numbers Craig gave him and the numbers he knew himself (number of units he shipped etc.). Based on ED's calculations, there should have been about 150 left in Craig's queue. Only recently has it become absolutely clear that this number is actually more than 3 times bigger.

As it turns out, Craig seems to have lied about his original queue size - or maybe he was just overly optimistic and bad at counting/bookkeeping, the lie was not necessarily intentional. Either way, given that Craig has essentially "left the scene" and doesn't seem to want to explain himself, we'll probably never know exactly what went wrong there. It is clear that Craig has (intentionally or not, I can't tell) given ED false information at several crucial points in time in the story of the Pandora. The initial misinformation was that the Pandora was in fact ready to ship in 2008, which was of course not true at all. ED probably wouldn't even have joined the project if not for this lie by Craig. When ED made his plans to shift production to Germany, these plans were again based on false information by Craig.

The only really fair solution would be that Craig somehow finds money to pay the production cost for the units he still owes his pre-orderers. In my opinion, that would still be the best option. But to be honest, I don't see where Craig would find that money anytime soon: maybe profits from iCP2 sales could be used for this, but I doubt the initial KickStarter sales are going have any significant profits (given all the delays and issues, he'll probably be happy with a break-even) so it will probably take a lot of time before there are enough profits to pay for all those Pandora units. And that is assuming Craig wants to use profits from his iCP2 company to fix his Pandora company - he is not obliged to do that, he can also just let his Pandora company die a slow and agonizing death (or declare bankruptcy). As far as I can tell, he is no longer interested in his Pandora customers or at least not willing to spend more time and money on them. That may seem cold-hearted of him, but I can understand it: the entire thing must have been a very frustrating experience, he has lost a lot of money over this (much more than any pre-orderer or maybe even more than all the remaining pre-orderers together), and his reputation went from "saint" to "satan". So I understand why he wants to have nothing to do anymore with the entire thing - yes, he is "abandoning" his customers, but in a sense he is a victim too. Some of it is certainly his own fault, but not all of it.

So anyway, given that that "actual fair solution" is not going to happen, I think ED's proposal is a good idea. If you're in Craig's queue, you can still wait for some miracle (Craig making lots of money with iCP2 and finally able to buy those units, some huge mystery donation to the pre-order fund, or maybe a Pandora successor happens in a few years and becomes such a big success that ED has so much spare money that he offers free units to Craig's old customers), or you can make use of ED's very generous discount.

In my opinion, the important thing here is that ED should be able to finally stop having to think about how to clean up the past (Craig's mess), so he can think about the future and his own stuff: paying back his debts and investors, designing a Pandora successor, maybe being able to drop the prices a bit in his shop, and so on.
Have you looked at iCP2 Kickstarter?  Looks like another mess.  I would not count on that.  

I think there was a comment that it wasn't fair that some of the survey people were getting units for less than ED's new suggestion.  These were the ones that were willing to pay more than others, but still less than what ED now suggests.  If you want to upset those people ... it might be more fair to put them on the same plan.

the problem with being fair is that many will see it differently.  Fair in this case is how much are you willing to give up because the likelihood of someone coming in and giving you what you order with no extra money and making  up for the last X years isn't likely to happen.

What would be best (my opinion) would be to follow  something like ED's suggestion (with or without tweaks).    

A big part of the problem is the product was priced too low in the beginning.

doob
 
Just lousy business tactics anyway you look at this. How can all this help the Pandora or the theoretical Pandora 2 sales wise?

A fair solution should have been found way back....yes I suppose it is easy for me to say this.

All of this has been going on for so long. It must be a shame and somewhat an embarrassment to those directly involved.
 
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Out of curiosity, how many of these parts do you have :


- 1ghz motherboards
350.

- Rebirth motherboards
About 20. They need to be produced if we need them.

- cases (I never understood, were all of the inital black cases sold ?)
About 1000 black ones and 1500 silver ones.
Wow, thanks for you quick and precise answer...

I thought there were many rebirth units in stock in need to be funded, but in fact this changes everything.

It seems it's not worth producing rebirth units anymore. Do you have many 600 MHz SOC components lying around ?
 
May want to add a note.. a few lines in the post or whatever you send to people..

Remember, these people have had their confidence shattered, and may not have ever or frequently checked the forum; also, the whole business is probably rather confusing. ("Who did I give me money to? whatnow?)

So maybe put in a line like..

# of pandoras built in 2013

# of Pandoras shipped in 2013

# in stock

Honest shipping date expected if we get 200 upgraders: ...

Something roughly like that; as proof that _now_ things are moving pretty well, so they can actually get one right away. Not just fishing for more cash as it may seem to some.

Course, the lcd uncertainty is .. I'd almost want to wait a few weeks until that is sorted out (?) until posting this; can you really promise to _these_ subgroup of people that the lcd issue will be resolved right now?

... just trying to fill the gaps :)

jeff
 
Can I just clarify what the donations will be used for? I take it they'll mainly be paying for the surveyed that wanted their Pandora for €150 or less and can't afford this offer. Will any be needed to pay for the time you spend repairing these CC units or other Pandora-related admin?


If you do need to redirect a little to cover those costs, that's fair enough by me. Just think it's fair to make it clear to the donators though.
 
MrConfusion said:
ED, have you actually even collected the money for these 200 and 150 queue people?

Have you even emailed them?

...

Do the "chosen" 150 even know who they are...
I think that's a good question, and might make a difference in what's fair to those people.
 
Course, the lcd uncertainty is .. I'd almost want to wait a few weeks until that is sorted out (?) until posting this; can you really promise to _these_ subgroup of people that the lcd issue will be resolved right now?
You stole my thought.

Please play it safe ED.

Also, when you've got the email written, is it possible to have the contents checked by a sufficiently competent person (i.e. law and liability stuff). I mean just in case. It will go to a lot of angry people who might, after reading it, just be looking for someone to sue :-(. And Craig is a no good target. Someone might get the idea that you are.

Play it safe.
 
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