I had an October 25th ship date. On October 25th it changed to the 26th. During the night of the 26/27th I got my email. Now for the next wait.
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I had the same experience. My email arrived at 9:54pm on Oct 26.
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WOW!!!
my shipping date moved back almost a month.
This is getting ridiculous.
stop promising us dates and then changing them!
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I agree with your points in general, that there was no malice/trickery in the original campaign. It was a campaign rooted in overly optimistic expectations of the timeframe to move something from prototype to production-ready, complicated by the unexpected success of the campaign in terms of units sold.
However, then we have to look at the decisions made since then. And we have to differentiate between âmaliceâ and the moral ambiguity of how GlowForge has released information. We are like the proverbial frog in the cookpot. If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out. But if you put it in a pot of room temperature water and gradually increase the heat, the frog will stay in the pot and end up cooked.
Similarly, GlowForge has trickled information on delays over the last 2 years, constantly promising âoh weâre almost there, just a little while longerâ. And theyâve demonstrated over multiple occasions that they are willing to put out misinformation (e.g. make promises on shipping dates) when they unquestionably know that information is inaccurate. They have also twisted the English language to try to spin facts (e.g. product shipped = weâve sent an email asking you if you still want your GlowForge).
If they had published in December of 2015 that the likely ship date of a GlowForge would be late in the 4th quarter of 2017, with International orders not shipping until 2018, I fully expect that a large percentage of their pre-orders would have cancelled. So instead they continually sent out updates that gradually pushed the date back.
I feel that every communication has been vetted with the intent to ensure that they minimized order cancellations. If they had to withhold information, publish unrealistic schedules, etc. thatâs what they did. Does this constitute malice? I donât think so. Is it morally ambiguous. Most definitely. Does a company have an obligation to protect stakeholders (investors/shareholders, employees, etc.)? Most definitely. Does that obligation warrant distributing disinformation? I personally think not, but corporate America behaves as if it does.
I DO NOT believe this is a scam. I choose to believe that the GlowForge team has been working hard at building a product that we all will love, and every step of the way finding opportunities to improve the product. And I believe they have tried to find ways to compensate their customers for the extraordinary delays (proofgrade materials, credit in the store, extending the warranty).
I have backed dozens of crowd-funding campaigns. This campaign has had the greatest technical complexity, the longest delivery time frame, and the largest investment (but only by a small margin) of any campaign I have backed. I have had the good fortune to only have 1 campaign I have backed (to date) fail to ultimately deliver - and it was a only a partial failure; I did receive some of what I was promised. I fully expect this campaign to deliver to all the individuals who have the patience to hang in there. And I totally understand the frustration of those who continue to vent in this forum.
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We no longer use the phrase âhot seat.â The proper term is âsexy chair.â Please make a note. 
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I apologize for misattributing the initial post of it to you.
Yes, I flagged one comment. The flag was reviewed and not upheld. @dan posted a clarification and I have accepted his word on that.
Perhaps you should accept his word about articles he wrote and the role that article played in the development of the Glowforge company rather than continuing to state the opposite.
This is patently false since I doubt that this was the plan from the beginning and I have read the entire blog post in question.
This is not true. Frogs will not sit in gradually warming water until they boil to death. Lots of articles out there debunking this from various & sundry authoritative circles (and some non-authoritative ones but they usually were just parroting the ones by actual reptilian scientists). Worth Googling to spend some time in a rabbit hole 
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Accepted
I would like to take the optimistic position, however Danâs predated article all too conveniently aligns with what has already played out. Melliott716 neatly spelled out above what Iâve been thinking for a while now.
I am somewhat curious why people need to find some kind of malice or duplicity? Itâs not as if you havenât had the opportunity to back out at every turn (which is better than you can say for Kickstarter). So thereâs no real ground for legal action â if you wanted your money, you just get a refund and be done. Is it really that hard to believe that a company (which is really a fairly small group of people in this case) might be overly optimistic, somewhat in over their heads and always hoping for an 11th hour reprieve in face of technical and logistics challenges typical for a technology project? Glowforge certainly isnât the only company thatâs announced a product far in advance of when itâs ready for market, willing to take peopleâs money for it and then announcing delay after delay.
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Got my Golden Ticket Email last night @ 9:57pm Eastern last night. I replied by 10:30pm same day.
So now we get to see if it is going to show up the one week of the year I am not home.
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Go on Google it. Then spend some time reading the articles and wondering why we might pay scientists to try to boil frogs 
Amazing sometimes what people do in the name of science. Can you imagine the scene in the lab when the frogs start to jump out of the pots of water? Worthy of a Big Bang Theory episode 
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Theyâre both engineers. Itâs pretty cool watching their cogs turn.
Damn you. Thereâs half an hour I wonât get back. (Kind of worth it, though).
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I havenât done the research youâve done, so apologies if my frog analogy doesnât strike a chord with you. I still believe that the technique of gradually slipping the date again and again, as opposed to providing a single realistic estimate as to when they would be ready to produce the machine in the volumes necessary to fulfill their order backlog, was intentional. It is also possible that it was the result of refusing to learn from their own experience (e.g. ignoring evidence that suggested they would encounter challenges along the way and simply building a schedule based on the assumption that everything would go exactly as planned).
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Yes I will get a e-mail probably within a few days. And I will have a pro glowforge to use.
I believe the latter (engineers are always certain that theyâll be successful all the way up to when theyâre not and then they repeat that ). I understand others believe the former.
Pretty sure itâs hardwired into people - thatâs why no one is changing anyone elseâs minds here with all the back & forth. It becomes a religious debate not unlike glass half full or half empty.
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I wrote that on June 27th, and I stand by it. In 36 years as a software engineer, Iâve been through many product development cycles. Some have been delivered on time. Others have slipped significantly. You canât account for every contingency. If youâre slipping a product launch, itâs because youâve found things you hadnât been able to predict. And if you think youâre that close to shipping, 6 months is a far-off horizon beyond which almost nothing can be predicted. Because if you could predict it, you wouldnât have thought you were close to shipping.
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Was the Program Manager and Chief Engineer on a half dozen projects that dwarfed the cost of the GF laser. $35M -$120M. All but one was within 15% of original cost and time projections. The customer and budget authority thought I walked on water because it was unheard of to meet the performance and cost estimates.
My least complicated project doubled in price and tripled in duration. All of a sudden I didnât know how to manage a project. The designer of a new integrated circuit couldnât get me the part after 3 years of trying. Itâs pretty darn easy to point fingers. Looking forward to Karma for those that do.
BTW:. My projects were technically more challenging but far, far easier than delivering a GF laser because I only needed to build one or two prototypes. Logistics and manufacturing is the hardest part. So donât have a lot of respect for anyone that claims they could do it better, no matter their experience.
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Getting the news that an estimated ship date was posted, I checked my account for it. My pre-order for a basic was on the 24th of October - which is in the 30-day window. Yet my shipping date is estimated for mid-February 2018! The production status today (10/27) says basic machines from Day 20 are being shipped⌠and I was on day 30⌠so Iâm guessing production should be able to finish the 30 day preorders sometime in November?
Suffice to say Iâm a bit confused because the estimated date doesnât jive with what is being posted. And my estimated date has already slipped - it first was at the end of January 2018 and now it is mid-February 2018. Iâm in the US so international certification is not involved here. Is the algorithm for this estimate really working?
If it is, at least on the bright side my Proofgrade credit is getting bigger!
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