John Biggs @ Crunchgear had this to say: Notion Ink fans now considerably harder to find
The folks at Technolink had a few comments too, and did refer to a post of mine on PO3 recommendations.
Meanwhile, Rohan Shravan gave an interview and had a few interesting snippets, and I'll let you decide the merits - considering all that you've heard and read so far.
- 110 employees including interns + consultants (yeah, they're not small...)
- Adam 2 slated for December
- "We have operations in 87 countries" ... wait, what?! It's possible the journalist misquoted Rohan, as I'm aware that happens, but he says it twice. It is my understanding that NI has operations in 1 country, ships to 87, and has support tie-up in maybe 3 countries. Operations in 87 countries?!!
- He suggests that poor reviews were a result of 'too much expectation and not enough access to the device' - nope, no hint that they did anything wrong at all.
The insinuation that the poor reviews are because they didn't send out review units is laughable. It's also insulting. Engadget is owned and operated by a publicly traded company, even if they had to pay for their review device, it came out of a gadget budget set by Aol, it didn't come out of the reviewer's pocket.
ReplyDeleteAlso, that "operations in 87 countries" and "95 - 110 employees" mantra sounds like more overexagerrated bullshit. Just because you can ship to 87 countries doesn't mean you have operations there. And if they have 95 full-time employees, I'd like to know what they do. It seems they have a software staff of about 10 and maybe 3 dedicated support staff. Frankly, since they outsource manufacturing and are dealing with such a small quantity of units, I'm not sure how they could have 95 employees.
He's also clearly never heard of the Osborne effect, because if he had, this so-called student of tech history would know that rule number one of product dev is not to start hyping your successor when still trying to sell an existing product. Especially when it sounds like he is trying to do press to get more funding. Apple is the only company I can recall that has ever pre-announced a major hardware change (the PowerPC to Intel transition that was announced in June 2005 and started to ship in January 2006) that didn't have a negative impact on sales. Even then, Apple fully expected to sell fewer Macs leading up to 2006. When it didn't -- and the company actually sold more -- it was as much of a shock to them as anyone. And Apple had the capital to ride out a sales crisis in order to transition to Intel.
Assuming anyone would be idiotic enough to want to buy an Adam, without the promise of a successor, why would someone be willing to put up with delays a s buggy software and not just wait for Adam 2?
This entire company is a joke.
Yes, he 95-110 employee count made my head spin - I wonder what they are up to, and it warrants a look.
ReplyDeleteYou have to wonder about the wisdom of talking Adam 2 when Adam 1 is mired in controversy, but if he plans to string along people like he did in Adam 1, I have serious doubts about it working this time. While a few like the hardware, the vast majority are unlikely to recommend it to anyone else.