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Originally Posted by DaleReeck
"Selling them incorrectly" *sigh* Good job HP and T-Mobile. Instead of selling when they are out and making money for both your companies as soon as possible, let them sit on shelves in order to stick to some arbitrary release date :roll: As long as I live, I will never understand the reasoning that large corporations come up with sometimes.
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First off, I didn't mean this from a moral standpoint or anything.
Second off, it's in the interest of the vendor to provide a consistent purchasing experience across their entire domain. By setting a fixed release date, they ensure that (in theory):
1. The units are in stores everywhere
2. That people know how to sell them
3. That the support folks are brought up to speed
etc.
It makes perfect sense. Productizing, producing, releasing to market, and supporting is a very complicated setup. To allow premature releases might excite the early adopter, but we're a small group, and the rest of the consumers that accidentally get the device in their hands are potentially subject to a subpar experience, which may reflect negatively on the carrier. (Whether or not T-Mobile does a credible job
after the release date is another issue entirely.)
As for making the early adopters happy, there's really three strategies:
1. Don't bother, as they're a small group;
2. Form a subset group of potential early adopters and let them play with the device until it's ready in stores.
3. Allow pre-orders and try and fulfill them earlier.
I'd bet that #2 happens, but it's in the vendor's interest to keep the group manageably-sized. There are people already carrying around development Motorola MPx units, for example, and I'm sure they've contributed feedback to Motorola.
As for the third option, it can potentially be a logistical nightmare. Even though early adopters are generally more tech-savvy than the rest of the end-users, there's still potential support headaches, expectations of support being honored, etc. #3 rapidly devolves into an end-user situation (despite being more technically savvy), and frequently vendors don't do it, opting for #2 instead.
I haven't dealt with hardware directly myself, but I
have been involved in software production and deployment on specialized hardware, and it's much, much more involved than you might think at first glance.
--janak
iPAQ 6315, 4700 Availability Updates
I thought I heard August 26th from someone? Did they change that, or was I dreaming? :? :lol:
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