The difference between saying & seeing it through... here's a list!

This post is long, but I think you will find it quite interesting. So bear with me.

When people like me criticize Notion Ink and its CEO Rohan Shravan, some of the responses from the fans is that we're making statements without substantiation. One of the issues is that the CEO does not keep his promises, and some contend that he hasn't really made any.

You will agree with me that that ONLY marketing channel for NI is it's blog. That means you either believe what's said in it, or not. When the leader of a company makes a statement that something is actually being done, I, for one, tend to generally believe it. At least with the respectable CEOs - and I hope Rohan is trying to be one.  There is a difference between vision statements - where you say 'you'd like to be X or get to X', which is an aspiration, versus factual statements where you say 'we're doing X and you will see the result'.

I can understand not meeting vision statements - they change when companies realize that certain things cannot be done for various reasons or the vision needs a tweak to respond to dynamic market situations. What I cannot dismiss easily is when someone says that certain things are already being done and then not follow-up on it. That makes the statement a misdirection or worse, a lie. That reduces trust. A lot about building trust is about keeping true to your word, or when that's not possible, letting people know quickly that something changed and you will therefore do something else. Or in the worst case scenario - apologize and move on.

In NI's situation, a lot of us have always had the feeling that we were led along. All I did was take 30 minutes or so to scan through NI posts and simply picked sample statements that clearly indicated that something was being done and we would see the result 'soon'. See for yourself how vague some of these are, and where they are in terms of reality. I will let you be the judge.

For fans reading this - please spare me the 'they're a start-up' nonsense. It's now 2 years and they have stated that they have over 90 employees now. They've talked about doing Adam, Adam 2, Adam 3, Eve, Eden 2, Genesis, game development,  BLISS, DIY home automation systems. That's not a start-up's cup.

So, here you go. Statements picked right from http://notionink.wordpress.com - which is the official blog of the company. The bold emphasis is mine, and the italics under the paragraph is my commentary.

UPDATES: GO TO END OF POST TO SEE NEW GEMS. CONTRIBUTE.

03 April 2010
Lot’s of ‘extremely exhaustive’ content coming your way! We want to make Adam a universal device which can give you access to a lot of different kind of content, and that is exactly where we are working right now

No evidence of 'extremely exhaustive' content. Not sure what this even meant. Can someone point to me what this "extremely exhaustive" content is, please? It has been over a year since. 

03 April 2010
Being a student myself, I am personally working to make the lives of all students pretty easy when it comes to getting educational content on the device and that too, at a competitive price

Anyone have specific examples of what this educational content is? Links? I have so far seen nothing that specifically was an outcome of this statement

03 April 2010

We are doing some innovation on email front as well. Business people will love it. It will give you an amazing freedom which we never had.

No evidence of such amazing innovation that would be loved by 'Business people', can someone please point out to me specifically what it is? And how does it give 'amazing freedom' we 'never had'

09 June 2010
The UI team has dome some extremely beautiful job and we were waiting for them to finish up so SDK can be released. So, developers gear up!

Anyone got this SDK? Can some developer please share your experience with us?

09 June 2010
We have also done wonderful innovations on e-mail front. Something which might become the biggest differentiation for Adam

That was over a year ago. Can someone point out what the differentiation is...?I haven't seen anyone talk about Mail as the differentiator for Adam recently, so it would be nice to know what "exactly" it is.

09 June 2010
Think about it, if we are doing well, we are talking about at least a business of 100k devices a month. That will amount to at least $350 million dollar of revenues in the first year itself

That means he was thinking about mass market back in June 2010. Wonder which one is the first year... 2011? Why are all marketing techniques targeted towards hackers? Or does he think that hackers and people who have time to deal with OS issues are so numerous in number that he can sell 100K devices a month to them? 

12 August 2010
Application designers can get hold of devices and SDK much early and if you are one of them, join us at relations@notionink.com

Have any app developers got the devices? Any good examples? Share with me!

12 August 2010
But then, neither can I hold on to you forever, neither can I give you a buggy device!

"neither can I give you a buggy device!" Can we say with certainty that he delivered on this promise when the device came out?

30 August 2010
Only 200 people will get selected in the Early Access Program (EAP) and there is a lot which they will get in return like:
- Adam itself! I believe these will be the only people other than our labs who will get access to Adam.

- More on what all will be there when you register for the upcoming EAP web portal.
to get to play a pivotal role in validating the pre-production software full access to the OS and UI which we have developed

-24×7 engineering support from Notion Ink (email as well as on phone)
other things like: marketing opportunities, etc. will be explained in the program itself

Now almost a year later, surely we can get details on how many got into the program, how many got the Adams,  the 24x7 support, and metrics on how successful the EAP was? Can anyone who was part of this program please share your experiences - there must be many of you?

14 September 2010
Coming up on Adam along with other stores is a brilliant Comic Store! We will again go public on this in October

Can anyone point me to this brilliant comic store... been over 9 months now, and 8 months after the 'October'. Surely it must be there?

24 October 2010

The EAP. Probably we will have to do the closure earlier than on 3rd November because of the sheer entries and participation. ... What we are doing here is to talk to all of them personally and check what is the end use case, how can we work together and improve the current eco-system and Adam itself.

How many did they talk to? How many got the Adams? How did they contribute to the overall great quality of Adam and Eden? Do we think this program actually existed considering the issues post release?

13 November 2010
In the EAP 2 we have around 46 countries! EAP was multi pronged test for us. Production Validation, Logistics (handling shipments, etc. for so many countries), test of the support system, work on the feedback before it reaches masses (ones which we can quickly fix) ...

So is he suggesting EAP actually worked with all those stages? Why is it that the post release was plagued by horrible support, delivery, buggy software? Can any developer share with me what exactly happened in EAP that the result was so poor? He talks about 'test of the support system' - where is this support system? It is now 8 months!

27 November 2010
Notion Ink is about bringing that ‘future’ faster towards us (but not rushing by releasing sub-standard products, we are here to stay for centuries)

 "not rushing by releasing sub-standard products." That's the second time he's said something like that. Can we say, again, with certainty that this is what happened post release?

27 November 2010
I apologize for being little mystic in this post, but I want to point in the future, back to this post and tell you that I shared a secret and hint with all of you, and it all happened in front of your eyes!

It's been 7 months already, can you please tell us what. I'm dying from suspense.

Dec 11 2010

"My next goal is to make Notion Ink best in its customer relations and whole of my energy will go into making this happen"

It is no news that NI customer service has been horrendous. The CEO said, 6 months ago, that all his energy will go towards best customer relations. This is a startup, as the fans keep pointing it out to me, then why is it, after 6 months, that support is still horrible? There is practically no support system except an anemic facebook-members only support forum. Did he mean what he said?

28 January 2011
We have started working on the Honeycomb and looking into how soon can we offer the update to you all!

They started working on HC in January and must  have done a lot of work on it in the 6 months. But they released TR's version? Can someone from TR let us know if you were working with HC since January? If not, what was NI doing in the last 5 months?

28 January 2011
All the softwares developed by Notion Ink are open source and will be shared with the community soon.

Where can we get 'all the software' developed by NI? It said 'soon', it's been 5 months now.

08 February 2011
I will introduce him soon! (New UI designer since August 2010)

Nice to meet him. Who is it? Shouldn't take you 5 months to introduce him...really

08 February 2011
As I told you earlier as well, Honeycomb on Adam is a work in progress now. All application are also on time for their port on Honeycomb.

Brilliant. But....NI released TR's version? What was done by NI in the last 5 months?

08 February 2011
The EAP2 Program and SDK. Now that still hasn’t kicked off because whole Notion Ink is in the mode of switching from Froyo-Gingerbread to Honeycomb. It makes more sense to share on a platform where developers can ensure their art work on more devices and which is a standard. RenderScript is also one part we are waiting for

What happened then, eventually?

13 February 2011
Our developers are loving Honeycomb while porting their apps on it

But...you released TR's version?

15 February 2011
Sales this time has been extremely good and now you will find more Adamites there!

He did mention that 'if things went well' they would be looking at 100K devices a month. So if sales have been 'extremely good', what is it?  1 million? 100,000? I think it was less than 1500.

03 March 2011
Support team strength = developer team strength. As discussed earlier we have expanded our support team and now in fact it is bigger than the developer team

This was in March. 3 months ago. There is a post from Michelle in Conclave, on May 14th, saying they have further expanded the support team. That tells me that NI had a support team larger than dev team in March, and then further grew that in May. That's a really big support team. I'll leave it to the readers judgment on whether this rings true.

03 March 2011
Dev team is maintaining a TRAC (moved out from wikidot now) for the current development process which will be opened for all to see, especially the wiki part

This was in March... it's been 4 months now, can you share a link to this TRAC?

UPDATE: OCT 1 2011 - THERE IS A BASIC SUPPORT SYSTEM IN PLACE FROM TODAY

29 March 2011
In a couple of days, Notion Ink will go live with its forum and next, live chats with the moderators and support staff will start

This was 3 months ago. None of this is here except a basic forum that requires a facebook account to login.

UPDATE: OCT 1 2011 - THERE IS A BASIC SUPPORT SYSTEM IN PLACE FROM TODAY. NOTE  - THERE IS NO CHAT WITH MODERATORS ETC. BUT THERE'S A TICKETING SYSTEM

29 March 2011
There is one special assurance for Adam owners. their devices will never get obsolete

How so? Will they get their hardware components replaced for free as hardware evolves? Can NI please confirm this and tell us that when Adam 2 comes out with new PQi, then Adam 1 owners will get their screens replaced for free? Same for CPU, Hard Disk etc? 

30 April 2011
Starting 2nd May, posters will run across Bangalore on the plan we discussed in the last blog. It’s a one of its kind and bound to change a lot of things.

Can someone from Bangalore please confirm this to me? Any pictures on what this is? It should have started 2 months ago already...Why is there no update to this?

30 April 2011
the expectations are enormous, you need to get the things right the first time and as I love to say

In a press interview recently, Rohan said that the reason there is criticism of Adam is "because there were too many expectations" - but here he says that 'expectations are enormous and you need to get things right the first time'. 

06 May 2011
This blog will again take the technical route starting from June, when we will enter into the world of NEON, PVRTC, Parallel Processing, 3D gesture detection and much more.

No such posts in June.

28 May 2011
Last 6 weeks we were integrating all support pieces to an advanced online system, which you will soon see go live on support.notionink.com.

On 29th March, he said NI would go live with several support improvements. It never happened. Now on 28th May, he said we would 'soon' go live. It's been over a month now, and no news. We're talking about a basic support system that is not in place over 6 months after release, and with a support team that is supposedly larger than the dev. team, and with more than 95 employees that would mean at least 35-40 support people. What are they doing?

UPDATE: OCT 1 2011 - THERE IS A BASIC SUPPORT SYSTEM IN PLACE FROM TODAY

28 May 2011
We have a team here working on automation systems, and after their study we will release few DIY system using which you can do interesting things!

Month over, surely we've gone past 'study', and why is NI working on DIY home automation systems? They also have a game division...and then they also have Adam 2 and Adam 3, and also Eve  (or whatever), and Eden 2, and preparation for Ice Cream Sandwich. And this is what fans still call 'a start-up'. I call this a company that has no clue or focus on what it wants to be.

UPDATED

June 27th 2011

"We will continue to push the updates so you all get the best out of your Adam!"  Nope. None that I know. It's been...July, August, now Mid September.

July 26th 2011

"The content project which we brushed earlier is also going in full pace. I will cover it soon." It is now 1 and 1/2 months since he said. No update on what this content project is. 

"I have been collecting comments and thoughts from Conclave and majority of them want us to focus on the screen quality, camera, battery life and wi-fi strength. We have done extensive research on these fields and will share it with you in coming weeks.

Bye for know, will keep you posted!."

So, he's been collecting "thoughts", and this was 6 weeks ago. No update on the research. A new blog update came out today (16th September) and it has no reference to any of these and instead promises new research!

He has made new promises in today's (16th Sep) post, so let's wait to see how long it takes before it amounts to nothing.

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So, I will leave it at this and let you judge this behavior by its merits. You can ignore it all, and it's your choice. Building trust requires that a leader stands behind his words when he says 'something is being done', and the sad thing is - I haven't even picked all the statements he made. None about build quality, software quality, Wi-fi, battery, screen quality and so on.

There's also an amusing observation I made today from posts on the official forum - that's for next time.