If you’re a competitor, knowing your drop-dead (ahem) dates for marketing and shipping can help you allocated resources. You might even want to bet that making a highly public large volume shipment a week before an announced competing volume shipment start would mess with sales over the longer term.
At this point it’s not just about whether pre-orders cancel but also about capturing the long train of people who are going to be wanting a prosumer-quality laser in the coming year or two.
I don’t see how. You have the same resources available whether somebody else ships something or not. How you allocate those resources won’t change. At least I don’t see how or why one would.
This, I believe, will come from straight up fact. How do the competing devices, well, compete? I don’t think many will consider pre-release moments when they make their choice when they have real-world examples to look at.
Unless a company is running absolutely flat-out (which you can only do for so long) you can always try to allocate more resources to a particular project to get it done sooner, or decide that shipping with a slightly reduced feature set/slightly less QA/etc is better than missing a market window. If you know the competition’s schedule, you can make decisions based on that; if you don’t know, you have to make decisions based on the earliest date they could plausibly ship. (When I was in the magazine business fulltime, we would often adjust the scope of stories based on what could get done before the press deadline of the next issue, for example, because if we missed that window someone else would have a not-as-good story published a month or two ahead of us.)
As for the second, it’s nice to think that feature set and usefulness are the final arbiters for people deciding between competing products, but a very large chunk of the world’s economy is based on people’s beliefs that it doesn’t work that way.
That’s certainly true. But I wonder how much the specifics can really help there. The world knows Glowforges are supposed to be rolling off the line at a pace of hundreds per month, right now, and thousands per month in just 2 months. That’s already wildfire, viral, out there. I suppose it’s possible that the finer points could help a little, but at this point in the game I don’t see it. Just my POV. I absolutely recognize the validity of yours as well.
I personally don’t want to think about anything of this, too much guessing leads to unnecessary stress. GF staff is doing what they need to do, and they are going to do it the best way they can, at least that’s what I believe.
I understand schedule slippages. We all want a good product. However, I am like many on the boards - at the end. I ordered this so we could expand our prototype capabilities in my class. I will now have gone through 2 school years of students without this ability. I am seriously considering if it gets bumped again (I was in the pre Oct 25 deadline group), that I will have to get a product from someone else. A number of places sell used commercial machines to those in education at discounts.
Does the March/April delivery date still stand?
I don’t recall there being a March/April delivery date mentioned anywhere.
Current tentative shipping (not delivery) schedule is listed below:
Crowdfunding Campaign:
We’re scheduled to ship all orders placed before Oct 25 2015 by July 31, 2017.
Post-Campaign:
We are scheduled to ship all units ordered after the campaign by August 31, 2017.
Excuse me… it was March/August. Which July falls in anyway… was hoping for earlier.
Yeah, as far as I know, that’s still holding. 
We have an update from Dan coming sometime soon, maybe he’ll mention it.
Dear Dan, just one question. Independently of the purchase Date (in my case before the 25th of Oct 2015). With how many weeks in advance are you going to ask for the new shipping adress?
From what they’ve said in the past, they are going to ask for your shipping address right before it ships. However, you can choose to not provide it right away if you want/need to delay shipment of your Glowforge.
I guess the answer to your question is 0 weeks in advance. (Not counting the time it takes to actually get to your house)
I don’t have a number for you - but if you’re not ready, you’ll be able to defer to later.
Did you get your money back yet?
I think if @psyborgue cancelled they will no longer be able to post on the forum, so you might no get an answer.