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My biggest problem with them is their empty promises; more than once, they've said, "really soon", and apparently that means nothing to them. It's important they say what they have to say ("won't be ready for six more months"), rather than what they think the customers want to hear ("coming really soon"). Be precise, not vague/subject to interpretation. "Six months" may be "soon" in a certain context, but as a customer, to me "soon" means "the next 10 minutes". They should instead be more precise. It feels like they take me for a fool; I do understand and accept that projects slip schedules etc., but I don't enjoy being exposed as a naive fool every few months when the Wakemates wake up and make a "coming soon" blog post. In their last blog post, they said, "coming soon, but this time we learnt from our mistakes, so our projected ship dates are even bogus, we are actually going to beat the dates we posted!" -- http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/04/01/first-units-shipping-new... -- so now my expectation is that they in fact beat the date they posted, and if they simply met their second commitment, I'd still feel like they screwed up! This is them setting themselves up for failure. Further, they invalidated the brownie points I would have handed out ("wow, they promised date X, but they actually beat it; maybe they're not so lame after all!") ... if Wakemate shipped right now, they still don't get the brownie ... ("they promised they would beat the Sep 2010 date, and hey, they just beat it. whatever") ... kinda sad side-effect which probably wasn't thought out before they made the blog post. After all this mess, there is no space left for sympathy; "oh, building hardware is hard!" - sure it is, but if you make me look like a fool in the process, I don't really care if it's hard or not. The value of setting expectations is vastly under-rated, in my opinion. Edit: And the blog post title could not have been more inappropriate - "WakeMates are shipping!" was the title - I clicked that to see where to get my tracking information, and instead I'm told "Oh, wait until Sep 2010". I mean, really guys?! |