Are we still on this schedule?
@dan “We’re working to have them all delivered by that date - although international customers have a higher chance of us missing our date.”
Oct 31 is All preorders; “Shipping” (Golden ticket email sent), “Shipping”(in the hands of the punishers aka UPS) or “Delivered”(in the hands of the owner)?
Because the world isn’t black and white. I can believe that someone is, or has been, dishonest about a particular thing and not believe that they are so dishonest that I wont get what I paid for eventually. I for one am in the camp that thinks the first few timelines, and the witholding of info in the leadup to the delays, is dishonest. I believe that they knew they wouldn’t make it in time. Especially as it neared the announcement of the delays. I can believe that and, at the same time, believe that they will still honor my purchase… eventually.
Again, this is totally subjective. Some people find his contribution helpful. Youre basically telling people to go away because you don’t like or are tired of seeing what they have to say but that’s not how a forum works.
Again, this is helpful to some people. Its just not helpful to you. The desire to assemble some sense of order to this by taking a community and consolidating our own info is made necessary by glowforges lack of communication on the issue. They wont provide shipping numbers (which would alleviate at least some of the worry) and so people postulate where they are themselves.
Perhaps not, but they also generally hit their release schedules. And when the dont, they get flack for it just as glowforge has.
It’s been ~70 days, how many have been delivered? 100 maybe?
@dan - just checking my understanding (and calendar math):
Ergo, anyone who ordered in the first window should receive their shipping notification email NO LATER THAN September 19, 2017. And anyone who ordered after that should receive their shipping notification email NO LATER THAN October 19, 2017. Some, after receiving their notification, may choose to delay their shipment (to wait for the filter); that’s their choice.
If you guys can actually pull this off, we’ll all be cheering and absolutely astounded.
On the other hand, I find this logistically improbable, based on the limited shipments to date and the reported packaging/shipping problems. But that’s what you’re committing to.
Now for the blunt words.
As others have alluded to, this sounds very like the update from November of last year, where everything was happiness and sunshine, followed in a few weeks by an announcement of a huge delay (where, after reading, it was OBVIOUS you had to know the delay was coming when you made the November announcement).
A second instance of this kind of deceit (strong words, I know, but what else would you call it?) would definitely result in a total loss of faith in this company. After all, this is very different from a typical purchase, where interaction with the manufacturer is limited once the product is received. The machine cannot even operate without connectivity to your servers. We will be leveraging your software, relying on your support, ordering ProofGrade materials, etc. for years to come. If you set a precedent that you can’t be relied upon/trusted, then what hope do we have that we will be able to continue to operate this machine successfully in the future?
I do feel like I suffer from BiPolar disorder with respect to this campaign. At times, I am berating other members for holding Dan accountable for not meeting their expectations, when it was clear their expectations had little in common with the reality of the campaign. And at other times, like this one, I am castigating GlowForge for not providing more insight, or for misleading us on the schedule. But I think the common thread in the cases where I become negative is when, from my perspective, GlowForge has intentionally (with or without malice) provided false information.
I hope that I am wrong, and that GlowForge can really pull this off.
I know if I don’t have my shipment email in September, I will be giving up on this company. They’ve used up their last chance.
My thoughts exactly - if another delay concerning international deliveries is announced after the “no change” now, I’ll want to know exactly how long ago the problems leading up to it were known… “CE certification? Oh, we thought we’d do that before lunch on September 18th… had no idea that took more than five minutes…”
In my mind you are basing your “must get the golden ticket by mid September” in a worst-case scenario that I think has little merit.
Yes, ProForgeOne hit the 6 week limit on the nose, but most orders we have heard about have been shipped well under that time frame.
I would decide where to draw that line much closer to the Sept. 19th date and take into account the shipping volume ramp that we see over the next month.
But that’s me, and I am not going to be drawing that line myself. Just trying to provide a different viewpoint.
(Edit) They have already acknowledged the international shipments as the long pole, and have admitted since last month IIRC that they are the most at risk of missing these dates.
What that says to me is that there are still some regulatory (or other) processes that they cannot control the timing of, but they don’t know which, if any, of them will blow out the schedule–and they won’t necessarily know a significant time e deadlines.
Hopefully we will see international shipments start sometime within the next month to at least some countries.
Ok, at the risk of attracting the ire of our community’s self-appointed skepticism police (somehow folks seem determined to enforce optimism), the little info we have already at least seems to pointing at the international delivery dates are still too optimistic.
I’ll bet from the inside, they’ve got info that makes the dates seem even less likely, but let’s say still possible if everything goes perfectly (which it won’t). Now the next problem is that this same info may be making it difficult to choose a new prediction that they’ve got any more confidence in.
In that situation, if I were trying to decide on what to communicate, I wouldn’t like it, but I can imagine thinking that waiting another month will give me more info to be able to reset the new timeline with more confidence. You might then suggest that they just say they’re working on a new schedule, but I don’t know, people seem even more upset with “we don’t know when” than with “it’s these dates until we announce otherwise” even when confidence is slipping.
I’m hoping we see more evidence that daily production throughput is going to be able to jump an order of magnitude+ soon. If they’re able to do that then the next update might have some disappointing news on the shipping front but at least you’ll be able to have more confidence in the newest dates (and more confidence than any of the dates before) since for the first time they’ll be building both basic and pros in significant volume (fingers crossed).
Sadder and sadder every day. It looks like I might get my shaper origin before Glowforge.
They have bumped back by a month… It could be neck-n-neck.
I am speaking solely of U.S.deliveries (I am in the U.S.). And my order date is about halfway through the original campaign If GlowForge has committed to delivering by October 31, and has promised a 6-week delivery window, then the combination of those two factors mean all deliveries that are promised by October 31 should receive their shipping notification (requesting a delivery window) by that September date.
Even though I didn’t mention any date (I just said September), I will be making some hard decisions in mid-September; because one of 3 things will have happened:
Unless we’re going to start to play semantic games (e.g. receiving the shipping notification requesting a confirmation of the delivery window constitutes delivery - which I would find a ludicrous interpretation).
It’s possible that they will abandon the 6-week lead-time commitment, or perhaps they are counting on individuals postponing delivery until the filters are ready, and thus suddenly shifting the date to December for a large number of units.
IMHO, the dearth of real information on production (e.g. number of actual production units shipped, production ramp-up projections - none of which are particularly illuminating for a competitor, but are EXTREMELY useful to us - is an indication there are issues. We’re told on this forum that the poor shipments are an anomaly, and most people are not experiencing this. But again, given no data to support this statement. And to quote Ronald Reagan, we should “trust but verify” these statements by having them provide actual numbers.
I was in technology consulting for 35 years, and communication is ALWAYS a challenge when you know there’s a delay, but you don’t know how long the delay will be. In every case, the manager who owned up to the delay, and identified the key pieces of data that would let them quantify the delay, while taking some heat, kept his job. The manager who failed to communicate the delay until the last minute was fired; especially when it was evident that he was aware of the delay much earlier, but had failed to communicate it.
I can remember a project I was brought in to help many years ago. The project had been in the design phase for 6 months; one week before the end of design they announced that design wasn’t finished, and they had at least 6 months of additional work. The entire management team was eliminated, and a new team brought in. The design was ultimately successfully completed, I led a very successful build and testing effort, and the system went into production. But the company never used our services again; they had completely lost trust due to that original failure to communicate.
What I heard is different. The current (second) batch is pushed back a month, but the first batch isn’t.
the email I got from Shaper said everything is been pushed back a month due to problems with their version of the pru. Nothing major, just enough to bump it back a month.
You type good points.
You(me and everyone else who look at the forums) have also been here long enough to know better. Hope typing it made you feel better because it’s been typed at least once a month(once every half hour for a week after each delay) and it is unchanged.
I hate to be the one to say it, but according to GF own definitions, “shipped” simply means that the initial email has been sent.
The banner up top says “We’re scheduled to ship all orders placed before Oct 25, 2015 by October 31, 2017”, it does not say Delivered by October 31st. So add 6 weeks to that for the latest delivery (outside of waiting for filters) should be mid-December, just in time for Christmas.
Everyone saying that they are expecting their email in September at the latest, please note that GF has a different definition of Shipped, and the “latest” you should expect to get your initial email is end of October. I truly hope that does not end up being the case, but we have to manage expectations.
Yeah, this amounts to the semantic games/spin doctoring that many companies do. I was once with a company working on a major piece of software, with a promised ship date in December. They boxed up a blank tape and sent it, made a big press announcement for Wall Street, and had a party to celebrate the shipment. When the recipient said they couldn’t read the tape, they responded that there must have been an error cutting the tape, and they would resend after the holidays when people were back from vacation (thus giving themselves another month of development/testing time). Needless to say I didn’t stay with that company much longer. “Ship” means the actual finished product has left the factory on the way to it’s destination. No reasonable person would interpret sending an email as shipping a product.
I’m hoping with everyone else for the best. In Dan’s own words:
Their intention is certainly to deliver (at least boxes on trucks, or boxes in houses at best) by that date. But from the definition of shipping that the company seems to be going by is shipped = initial email sent (consider reading the saga about the successful shipping of the first Pro by the end of June. He just received his unit recently).
This is what I thought as well. I think defining “Shipped” or “Shipping” as having sent an email to customers asking if they want their glowforge sometime in the next 6 weeks is utterly ridiculous. Nevertheless, I think they are planning on getting the emails out by the specified deadline. That way they were all “shipped” in time.
It is frustrating to see people that have listed their order dates after mine already receive shipping notice emails for their pro units.
I check my spam folder constantly so I am not sure what is up… and I have no way to know if an email was sent to me and I missed it or not.
B-/
You can always email Support and ask.
Not sure where you got your info on the company’s definition of “shipped”, as @dan seems to be refuting that in this reply.