Wednesday, November 30, 2011

It's fascinating when I look back

There's a lot I've vented on NI in the past months, starting with my first post, whose message still holds as true today as it was in April. It's fascinating how little this company learnt in the period.

The one that you might want to look at it is one I wrote asking 'What do you stand for, Notion Ink' - and in it you'll see a great paragraph from the CEO of Notion Ink, Rohan Shravan, explicitly stating that they're about to unveil a big effort in Bangalore - here's what it is

This summer Notion Ink is starting a unique (but mostly concealed, though we will open it for a small number of people in different domains who match the criterion set forth by the team) project which will run in-n-around Bangalore area for next 5-6 months. We’re hiring a very large number of contributors from colleges, clubs, various groups and, from diverse fields. The aim of this project is to create a mature “front and back end” system before we open it for the world. Design and develop a scalable model which is optimized for the goal and comprehensive enough to cover a majority of creative domains. We’re be working on the fascinating fields of the natural language processing, relationship extractions, algorithms like YAGO and snow-ball, and the dream behind all our efforts, the BLISS system.

This was back in May. I mean, you and I know nothing ever came of it. What happened to this "unique" project? Guess it was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo like everything else, DIY system, BLISS, Genesis, you name it.

Their website hasn't changed, we still haven't the faintest idea what it is really that they want to accomplish (if anything at all), and at the end of the post I said something to the tune of "you may be young and super bright..." and on that account I was really wrong. Only the "Young" part is true.

Monday, November 28, 2011

4 months... 30 minutes... all the same ;)

Found some new amusement for myself in this thread

Customer asks "hey can you do X" on Aug 6th

It took 24 days for someone to answer it, and "Chief" says

"Working on it" (mind you, this was Aug 30th)

Now, to me, when someone says "working on it" it means "working on it" - and considering that the request was fairly trivial (someone on the same thread says it takes 30 minutes) one would think that given Notion Ink's competent 100 member team this would take maybe 3 days :P

But nope - it's been 4 months and "working on it..." has remained that way. Just another of those things I guess where "working on it" / "coming soon" mean absolutely nothing.

PS - the request may have been trivial - if it can't be done for whatever reason why not just come out and say it? Why mislead and then not follow-up?

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Lowest standards of any fan base...

I'm convinced that the remaining NI fanboys belong to that group of people that have really low standards and impossibly low expectations.

It's such a fine group to sell to! Sell crap, they'll buy it and the best thing is they'll sing your praise for it and find reasons why the crap is gold. How cool is that.

Time for me to market them a few things I need to get rid of.

Hmm...so... has the "whole community" built ICS yet? because there's no ETA from NI. Of course they're waiting for the "community" to do their work for them so they can give them a "bounty" (here boy, candy for you) and perhaps use that as their own ROM (remember Honeycomb? After blogging and misleading people that they were doing their own release for months, they just took Tabletroms!) .  Why invest in resources and develop when you have people doing it for you for a low price. How sweet.

Hurry up "community", NI doesn't have all month long for you to finish it!

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Let's start building ICS folks... I mean *you* start ;)

Let me read between lines if you will humor me.

On Nov 12th, the CEO of Notion Ink said this on his blog

"17th is when we are expecting ICS to be finally out with the source, and then you will see whole community (aka TabletRoms) and NI pushing in ROMs with different flavors."

And then today (Nov 15th) he said:

"So, Let’s start building folks!"

See something common? If the Honeycomb experience is anything to go by, I guess the Tabletroms people better start cracking because that's what this really means: TR to help again. Don't expect NI to deliver much I suppose, maybe they'll surprise me.

So, NI, don't pull a Honeycomb on us. get original - don't release TR's ROM as yours once they do it. On the other hand I don't even understand why the TR folks are wasting time on a device that has a few hundred users and a dying community and instead focus on fast growing devices/communities where they can make a change. I say this because you can see for yourself the utter lack of interest in whatever Rohan has to say these days... 19 - 20 comments for big announcements, tell you not many care anymore (I do!)

 

Sunday, November 13, 2011

migration of support system is done... what?!

So the CEO of Notion Ink put out a blog post today stating that "Support is up again. Migration was successful"

Good.

Except that you should be asking - what the hell does that mean? In my mind "migration" means you were at point A and then moved to point B.

There was no point A to begin with. Remember, back in Oct 1st, he put this post about strengthening customer support  and that after 4 months of "study" they had implemented a new system with ticketing. That ticketing vanished soon after, and I kept asking why. It's now back with the CEO saying "migration complete" which makes me laugh - it wasn't there to begin with so what was the migration? Just making stuff as they go along.

So it took then 4 months to "study", implement a FAIL system, and then spend another month+ to bring back essentially what is was to begin with. How brilliant.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

100+ employees, someone could help this guy!

I haven't posted much because not much is happening. But look at this post in conclave today - poor guy has been waiting since June!


I mean, c'mon. NI has been waiting for Ice Cream Sandwich. They aren't selling Adam 1 anymore. They have 100 or more employees! And can't one of your busy engineers or managers help him out with some truth for a change?


 


 





Update: the link doesn't work.Maybe the author deleted it, but quite likely that NI decided to as well. "if you ignore them they will go away"