@confezioni_clever: I appreciate your support. Our goal is to deliver what we promised - a wonderful product that ships to you in the first half of next year. We’ll do everything we can to deliver on that.
Will everyone be getting an email about getting one shipped during the beta program in december? I don’t remember whether I indicated (or there was somewhere to indicate) that I would be using mine at a makerspace.
Look at the main Glowforge website FAQ “When will my Glowforge ship?” It was updated on Monday. It says “If you’re interested in getting an earlier, beta unit, keep an eye on your email. We’ll send an email when we’re ready for volunteers to try the first units.” (I probably shouldn’t post this because I would volunteer in a heartbeat).
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Oh, yes. I would be a test subject. I hadn’t noticed that. I keep going back to the main page and waiting for the catalog links to go live, but not much else.
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Haven’t seen anything about when the Catalog or GF provided materials would be available. I’m guessing that’s a lesser priority until the first units ship. Don’t know, it just makes sense to me.
Yes, my question was in response to that post (how would I have known about a beta program otherwise?). I was just asking for more details.
As i have mentioned before with another great technology, the Oculus Rift, a poorly handled release to its backers can lead to headaches.
Glowforge is mimicing the same style as Oculus with no clear order ‘position’ and an uncertain release date for Consumers. I am not saying that is a negative, not at all, if i were in your shoes i would advise the same but as @confezioni_clever has said it does lend itself to grumblings as non-US countries (who have paid a fortune for shipping fees) feel they are being treated second-class.
This was a HUGE issue for the Rift and all the time and effort they saved in NOT giving detailed shipping plans was eaten up dealing with irate O/S backers.
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You can’t know what you can’t know. I’m sure the company has an internal project plan hanging on the wall with development, test, production and shipping schedules broken down into a couple hundred steps. It would include a bunch of certification steps including CE and UL. It would have slop in the schedule for Beta test problems, and a gazillion other variables. But it’s still only a plan. Announcing an order sequence beyond what has already been stated would be commercial suicide. They can’t really know. I ran a $115,000,000 3 year project that was delivered on time and on budget, and another of equal complexity that was 18 months late with severe overruns. I developed a good plan for each but it’s always only an educated guess. Once production starts, and there are some successful shipments, they will have better confidence. The international customers are in no way second class. Just a few extra unknowns. My order is about ~#275 and the company plans to ship in sequence when possible. But the model I purchased could always have problems with Beta testing. It’s possible I could end up with #4000 waiting for the bugs to be worked out. No reason for me to complain about something out of the company’s control.
You are a smart man! Respect!
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As usual, rpegg’s got good insight. More generally: we tried to be very deliberate about promising things we think we can deliver on (shipping first half next year; all things being equal, first ordered first fulfilled) and not promising anything else. If you’re expecting something other than what we promised, you should definitely ask for a refund because we hate to disappoint people.
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This Tested article suggests that Makerspaces will be among the first to receive their glowforge laser cutters. Is there a mechainsm or process by which Makerspaces such as ours (Binghamton University Emerging Tech. Studio) can register or establish oursevles in that group? We have several hundred active students/faculty involved, and we’d be thrilled to provide usage feedback on a regular basis. Even if shipping order is not impacted as the Tested article suggests, we’d still like to help out however we can. 3D printers get all the hype, but I think that this will ultimately see more usage than any individual printer based on the type of objects being fabricated currently.
From a post 4 hours ago.
Sorry…operator error.
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