[lionhearted]

Emphasis mine:

> But when you choose to use language like that, live up to it.

You've probably never built a product before. It's not that Wakemate is "not living up to it", it's that they're thinking, "My God, this was supposed to be out two months ago. Okay, what's the worst case scenario? Four months? No way it can take more than four months. Okay, let's tell people four months and plan to get it out in two months."

All kinds of shit goes wrong when you're building a new product. Now, if you'd said "be more realistic" or "be more pessimistic" or "get better at estimating", I guess I'd agree with you sort of. But one thing they can't do is "live up to it" by willpower - these are young entrepreneurs trying to get their product out and it's a parade of trivial things are stopping them from doing so. At least, that's what I'm guessing, having built stuff before. I promise, they're trying and feeling about 10,000 times more neurotic and disappointed than any cool exterior would show.

[drewcrawford]

Emphasis mine:

> But when you choose to use language like that, live up to it.

Nobody stood over them and forced them to make strongly-worded promises about firm shipping dates. They chose to use those words.

They had missed multiple ship dates in the past; they were certainly well aware of the gravity and customer backlash of making promises they couldn't keep. They were also certainly aware that this would take an order of magnitude longer than they thought. Instead of saying "We're sorry, we have no idea when we will ship these", they decided to make an announcement that they would absolutely positively ship me my product by that date, if not sooner.

[SoftwareMaven]

The lesson here is that you don't give definitive dates unless you are the one controlling those dates (for instance, waiting for a particular event to ship the product that is sitting in your warehouse).

WakeMate wasn't, so they shouldn't have worded things that strongly. Never underestimate the number of things that can go wrong.

Edit: Get the name right, idjit

[gridspy]

Changing the design to accommodate a new flash chip is a pretty big spanner thrown into their works by an outside requirement.

Also, that authentication chip was probably a major headache.

Imho, they have some pretty good reasons for the delay. They don't have the manpower that a large company has to put onto sudden disasters like this.