Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Technical support turnaround in less than 12 hours...wow...

I do not usually post twice in a day, but this was brought to my notice - it's irresistible. One of those Rohan-speaks gems.

No, I did not say it. Rohan Shravan, CEO of Notion Ink, said it.

Here's an interview in NotionInkHacks (now TabletRoms) from March 2011 - you know, not long ago, and when sh*t was hitting the fan with delivery issues. It was a soft interview, I've got no issues with that. But here's the interesting sentence

Question: What is the typical turnaround time for a defective Adam at the moment?

Rohan's Answer: Varun is the best person to answer this. On technical glitch it must be lower than 12 hours as a line set in-house. The training is already over for the support staff. 

Hey Rohan, what is this "line" set in-house? Does anyone care about this "line"? Because we all know that turnarounds for defective Adams is in months, not hours. Even the emails aren't answered in 12 hours.

This must be among the most disrespected CEOs in the world, because a lot of what he says never happens.

Notion Ink Support team, LISTEN TO YOUR CEO, DO WHAT HE SAYS. Let's have a "10 hour turnaround" time - whatever that means. Hopefully it isn't like one of those "coming soon" definitions.

Hello, Anyone in Support? And definition of 'soon'

Will someone please respond to this guy?

It's sad and hilarious that he put his 'help me' response to so many posts that all of today's conclave posts end with his. Continued example of pathetic this company is just when I hope they may be getting their act together.

I've also read so many posts from Rohan Shravan and his "skilled" team about how something will come 'soon' (see post #13 of this thread for an example of irritation this causes). Something or the other is 'soon'.

A constructive criticism for you, Rohan. As CEO what you do influences your team too, so don't say 'soon' if you have no clue, because you've done it so many times it's shameful. Say something when you have a timeline - people will wait if they know how long they have to wait. Say 2 days. Say a week. Say by date X etc., stop saying 'soon' because it has no meaning in your (and your company's) communication. It could last from days to months.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Wonder what the Notion Ink investor is thinking

I can speculate, can't I?

Think about it: Someone, somewhere, decided to put a bunch of money into this company. I cannot fault them for that of course - because when they did, it was still a start-up in a true sense. Rohan Shravan & Co.  were trying something bold, and it looked like a winnable concept.

Unless the investor is someone with a big wallet and little brain, they would by now realize that this is a dream gone sour, unless they know some magical success philosophy that I do not know about, one that says "do a disastrous release, alienate everyone,  mislead when you can, and ... next version is success!!"

In the first phase of funding, one would imagine that the investor may not be able to pull back due to commitment. But now someone needs to pour more money if NI wants to release Adam 2. And whatever that Genesis and content project that Rohan Shravan keeps alluding to. And the "research" that his team is doing. And oh, Adam 3 too. And fonts too, whatever.

Whoever is continuing to invest in Notion Ink is either very stupid or very clever and sees something we don't. I certainly don't anyway - because doing so would require me to accept the following:

1. I will invest in a market that is incredibly competitive and has been dangerous even to big players (remember HP anyone? Or the problem Playbook is facing?) and my only USP - the PQi screen (not 2 USB PORTS OMG!!!) - will soon not mean much once Amazon figures a way out.

2. I will invest in a market that is expensive to operate in - after all, a good tablet experience means investment in hardware, supply chain, software, and the market is a fast moving, fast changing environment that requires continuous investment and mandatory growth to keep costs in control. In this market, if the company must make money to its investors - it must grow, grow profitably, attain some scale for cost reduction. I'm not saying that the first version should have been profitable, but it should have set foundation for a much larger v2 release that should be profitable.

3. I will invest in a company that has failed in its first revision - with bad software, uneven hardware quality, dependence on hobbyists to keep it alive, horrible customer support and somehow imagine that their next version will be magically successful.

4. I will invest in a company whose marketing strategy in the last 2 years is aimed at a completely wrong customer segment ("ultra geeks") vs. where it has to operate to sustain ("mass market") in the long term. Nothing wrong with patient geeks who will spend time to make it work, just that there aren't enough of them to build a tablet company and make money to its investors.

5. I will put my faith in a founder who talks but does not deliver, misleads his audience, has no focus of any kind, and has lead his company to a very poor experience so far, even after 2 years and 3 rounds of releases

6. I will put my faith in co-founders who are essentially talent-less or spineless (take your choice) and stayed silent as the founder ran amok

7. I somehow believe that with almost no following and no new customer/ follower additions to my brand and name, the next release will be a blockbuster.

A pretty popular saying is that you invest in the team, not necessarily the idea. Ideas come and go, and often morph. But a great team will execute & deliver. This, so far, is an incompetent CEO and a weak team, so what am I investing in? How am I so confident that Adam 2 will somehow be great quality supported by great service?

Or am I wise that I will no longer invest...?

Monday, August 22, 2011

Is Notion Ink Adam Dead?

Interestingly, that's one of the oft recurring query requests that comes to my site! It tells you what people are beginning to perceive, considering lack of updates, lack of meaningful updates, and continuing woes out there.

I don't think Notion Ink Adam is dead - I mean it's as good as, but as long as we keep reading clueless posts from their CEO Rohan Shravan (who, by the way, is again quiet for over a month after that "what was that" font post - and don't forget that not too long ago he promised posts once every 2 weeks, but then we know how good his word is)

Hey Rohan, or maybe a co-founder who values his words, can tell me again

What happened to Tactuslabs?

What are your 100+ employees doing?

Why are support mails going unanswered considering you said you had a large support team?

Where are HC updates - you did say that "frequent updates" were coming, but none so far that I see

Where are the updates for the "research" your team's been doing (You said, on July 27th, "We have done extensive research on these fields and will share it with you in coming weeks.Bye for know, will keep you posted!") It's been nearly 4 weeks.

Where?

Notion Ink Adam isn't dead, is it?

Sunday, August 21, 2011

another weekend

and nothing interesting happening. But here's an article maybe NI fans should read:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/martinzwilling/2011/08/20/with-great-startups-its-all-about-the-execution/

But I'll ask again... what in the world are NI's 100+ employees doing?!

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Where are the gutless Notion Ink management & investors hiding?

Never mind that none of the questions I asked got answered.

The sordid saga of buyers being left in a limbo gets worse. Here's a buyer who wants to escalate lack of response to better business bureau. Here's one that has not yet been taken care of after 4 months. Here's someone who needs help but now understandably worried about to sending the unit out to tactuslabs. You can see more of these in conclave and tabletroms and notionaddicts. The only good example I read was about a German user who got his repair done quickly paying over 150$ for what appears to be a fairly simple fix. That's it.

Even after repeatedly asking NI_Chief on twitter about tactubslabs - no response. Not on the blog. Not on twitter. What a deceptive bunch.

It appears that their US service center is possibly gone  - and yet this company will not come out and say what they are doing about it or what the status is. It has been weeks.

Notion Ink, there is no doubt that your Rohan Shravan, your CEO, is inept, clueless and misleads people - but where are the rest of you? Perhaps it's time for the spineless co-founders to speak up and do something about this company that long ago held some promise and not stay in the shadows making yourself look increasingly pathetic. Unless of course you are under gag orders from your CEO - in which case you should probably grow a backbone and do something that's a bit more respectable than taking people's money and making promises you cannot keep.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

response to thetabletpost.com - you've got it all wrong

The 'Tablet Post' is an effort by some Notion Ink supporters, and I happened to come across it via the Notion Ink blog. Now I don't have anything against a news letter edition that also writes encouraging words about NI or Adam, to each to its own. But I need to respond when an entire article is based on a faulty premise or resorts to chewbacca defense.

My response is to the article "Abilities versus Expectations" which is  in the Volume 2 Issue 7 of the site, and I'll get to why this whole line is both absurd and oblivious to facts.

But first, here's an interesting sentence from the article - bold emphasis is mine - "Is it reasonable to expect Notion Ink to be as agile (this is one of the great new buzz words in tech speak) as these other companies (Apple, Microsoft, Motorola and Asus)?"

Clearly the author either does not understand what agile means or does not understand how agile is referenced to in the business sense. It is a buzz word but you got it all wrong, Dale.

The  differentiating factor between a start-up and a large company is that the start-ups are agile! It's not the other way around! We should have expected Notion Ink to be agile - i.e. fast, responsive, able to move faster than its giant competitors and not be trampled by them.

If you think of a small area of a field and an elephant and a rabbit on it, the elephant is Apple or Asus and the rabbit is (or should be) Notion Ink. What the rabbit needs to do is

(a) figure out what kind of grass or leaves it wants to eat

(b) move quickly and nibble avoiding being trampled by a slow moving elephant and

(c) hop skip & jump and change its eating strategy as the elephant changes course.

Therefore, the rabbit needs to be agile. The elephant has scale (bigger, more resources, more power) but the rabbit has agility.

And this article gets it completely backwards, which goes to prove the point that Notion Ink is not an agile company, which is exactly what a start-up should not be! So yes, it is entirely reasonable to expect NI to be more agile than the big companies.

So, let's now agree that the author was really talking about scale and not agility. How fair is that comparison? Actually it's very fair. If we accept that premise that young companies simply cannot do well because there are larger competitors, then young companies cannot grow at all, and therefore in every industry the only companies that should be left standing are large, very old companies who got to the market first. But that's not how it is, is it?

I can pick any number of companies that started small and grew - Apple, Google, Microsoft - all challenged incumbents at some point in their past. There are tons of small companies that are doing very well in spaces that are occupied by large corporations. Roku should be dead because Apple is in their space, Boxee should give up because Roku got there first. TiVO should have never happened because cable boxes / DVD players were around. DropBox should be dead because carbonite was around. Fastspring should be dead because PayPal is around.

The way start-ups succeed is because they move faster than the big companies and capture specific segments of the market that either the big boys don't care about or are slow to get to (other than inventing new markets). The start-ups are responsive to customer needs, build great customer experiences and grow quickly when they're successful. Even when they screw-up horribly, they come back and keep their audience engaged till the problem is resolved (dropbox and airbnb are recent examples).

Compare that to a third rate company like Notion Ink. No transparency, no focus, plenty of unhappy customers who can't get answers to questions for months, horrible customer support, no acknowledgment of problems or how they will address them. It has nothing to do with scale and it has everything to do with focus and ability.

Stop defending a shameless company and finding excuses for their performance. They built the expectations and failed to deliver, and it's not the buyers fault as many want to make it out to be. Don't taint the start-up concept with NI's pathetic performance, there are plenty of start-ups who do just fine.

Those numbers in the article mean nothing - large companies are larger because they're, well, selling a whole lot more. On a sales to employees ratio NI is probably worse than even the bigger companies.

Alternatively just accept that Notion Ink has no ability. That's it.

Monday, August 8, 2011

NI has promised millions of dollars in incentives....

Wait, what?!!

Oh, there we go, another clueless irresponsible journalist spouting nonsense from NI. And given NI's track history of saying nonsense, it hard to figure out if this goodreader journalist just made it up or if Rohan actually said it.

Here's the quote from the source, referencing the mysterious Genesis: "NI has promised millions of dollars in incentives for various things to be developed, but put a hold on the idea"

Did Rohan actually say that or did  just make that rubbish up? Either way, that's one awful article with 0 research behind it. I also love the statements about "strong demand", "constantly sold out" and "US leads in orders", I call these "weasel words" which sound good but mean nothing without numbers.

Also, from the article, "Rohan and the boys are really excited about the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and Ice Cream Sandwich", yep, concerns of current users is all rubbish, I know. Who cares while you can string the fans along, just see the 2nd post in this thread. Makes me want to throw up - he even says "Rejoice in the almighty Adam's persona!" What?! Please, someone whip my bare bottom while feeding me nails dipped in glass shards to chew on.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

My weekend special... I'm beginning to think NI is not incompetent

That's what I've said previously - that they are incompetent. But now I'm beginning to think I need to change my tune.

They're not incompetent, I think they deliberately lie & mislead their customers and prospects. I mean deliberately, as in shameless and unethically. Here's why I've come to this feeling apart from all the other things I've talked about.

Read these 2 threads (one, two) on Conclave right now (before NI quietly removes them, which they do sometimes), the first, waiting for over 3 months and then another one, citing similarities. In each of these cases NI responded at some points saying they were being taken care of. They weren't, and they've paid money.

2 screen shots below, source: Notion Ink Support Forum



Here's the thing, the CEO of Notion Ink, Rohan Shravan, has gone on record more than once, saying he had beefed up his support team/setting up operations centers in many countries (a misleading statement, but anyway)/support team bigger than developer team/doing 100+ interviews/More than 90 employees and so on. If that is true, why is it so hard to resolve issues of users who have been waiting for months? Why is it that let alone solve the issue, no one even responds in time?! One would think a  "startup" (the fanboy defense) would respond with great speed on issues like this and keep their members informed.

Why is there no clarity on tactuslabs which is the authorized US service center? There was a thread where a NI rep responded saying "there were technical issues..." technical issues on tactuslabs end? do they exist? what happened to the users' Adams? Why isn't NI coming out transparently on that. It's not like they've sold millions of tablets and are swamped! I asked NI_Chief on Twitter more than once, no response.

Here's what I think: I think Tactuslabs is gone. They hedged their bets on NI and it was a bad bet (go to www.tactuslabs.com/index.html which still shows up, and you can see the NI focus  - and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that their business was unsustainable on such low volumes), their Amazon store has 0 products. If NI was communicating with them the same way they did with their users, no wonder that company had to bail out. There is no excuse for NI not giving clarity on this issue.

This to me is a hallmark of a third rate company that's deceiving its users. This isn't a one off thing, it's been happening for months while the CEO talks of great future, it's ridiculous.

Notion Ink employees are probably  worried about where they work and ashamed of how their company's management works.