Punter is a common UK-English (and not-so-common but well understood in Australia) term to indicate a Customer.
It can also indicate someone taking a bet but i assume that is not the usage here
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That triples the amount of transactions that have to be managed. That means resources have to be pulled from other areas in order to manage something else, and that affects getting this thing done.
GF shot themselves in the foot with these detailed dates because they caved to whims of a small handful of people and pulled software resources to do it, only for complaints to skyrocket.
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So, your view is that people would have been a lot happier if they just put out a blanket statement saying that outstanding orders would be fulfilled sometime between now and the middle of next year?
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Honestly, I think the big mistake was promising a product in 6 to 8 months that needed 2 years to complete. I recognize, being honest with and about myself, that I probably wouldnāt have pre-ordered if I had known that the hardware and software had not even begun to be designed at the time. This would have, I think, been a big mistake on my part. I feel it will have been worth the wait whenever I finally get it.
Honestly, it isnāt too difficult to understand peopleās frustration with the delays though. It isnāt a consumerās responsibility, necessarily, to understand the logistics and pitfalls of bringing a product to market. If it were, we would all just make our own products. That is the manufacturerās responsibility.
If, by all reasonable appearances, the manufacturer was aware that it couldnāt make its stated deadlines even as it was stating them, the consumerās frustration is warranted all the more.
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I donāt think anybody would have ordered if they knew it was going to take two years but if they had spent two years doing it in secret and offered it for sale now they would get the same number of sales and everybody would be happy.
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Agreed. Even at the higher price point.
The only reason people are upset is because they believed the companyās delivery estimates were (at least reasonably) accurate.
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Right, Iāve seen a few people compare this to Tesla delays, but they only charged 1000$ for a deposit to get in line, and they have given back interest on those deposits. So, if they had said, āDo you want to put down 50$ as a deposit for a Glowforge that will be ready in ~2 yearsā, I probably would have done that as well and wouldnāt have been concerned at all with delays.
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If they had announced its feature set and said it was two years away other companies, or even open source, would have beaten them to market. They would have had to keep it secret.
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Of those announced key features, which are actually available today (on the Glowforge, or elsewhere)? I think the end result would have still been the same, as it still has taken them 2 years get their product to market.
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Maybe, weāll never know. Or, the competition might have expedited the process.
Itās unlikely that the end result would have been positive-- the competition might have expedited the process but mostly due to a rushed product arriving too early. Itās easy enough to castigate GF for their choices but itās clear that developing a product like this takes a long time. Working in secret for two years and in particular engaging a high quality production line as part of that process requires a lot of money. So itās likely that some of the decisions were contingent on how to access that money in a venture capital form rather than relying on the purchases. If thereās a lesson to be learned currently from a lot of the crowd funding failures, itās that the VC capital comes too late in the process. The discounts offered as part of the initial crowd funding offering means that there are few margins for mistakes and delays. At least even this late into the process where Dan and co have burned through millions on the delays, you can still back out with full recovery of your money at any time.
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Sure. Itās easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. Iāve been through the process of bringing a product to fruition with VC funding. Iām certain that there were a lot of decisions made that were beyond their control. Iāve also started personal ventures that were entirely self funded and understand that certain aspects of the workload have to be handed off and this makes it impossible to control 100% of the schedule. The only issue I have had with any of this was in how the product was represented during the pre order campaign. They certainly marketed it as a product near completion and it wasnāt anywhere close. Maybe thatās par for the course in this industry but that hasnāt been my experience in any of the tech or real estate businesses Iāve been a part of.
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No.
My view is that nobody is happy and the only way to change it is to get units into peopleās hands.
The cheerleaders will continue to work to see the silver linings and the negatives will continue scrutinizing every detail, pontificating and making up their own narratives without enough data to make a complete picture.
Case in point, people are complaining about the estimated dates when they should receive their confirmation emails. Theyāre lodging complaints against data that is not even current nor correct. There are people who have received their final production units already, that have estimated email dates. Itās possible that everyone who has already received their units has an estimated date, they just dont know about it since they have their units, they have not checked for a date. Obviously that is going to skew things.
I donāt disagree.
However this forum has lots of people with product development experience and bringing product to market but every time one of these ācheerleadersā tries to bring a point across, there are people at the ready to cut them down.
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Would anyone be able to hire the development staff and secure the funding for that if there wasnāt a good reference for a customer base? Would anyone order if we knew it would be two years of developement before we received one? I am totally biased because I got to participate in the development phase and got some totally undeserved perks for participating in the forum. Anyone else who didnāt have a Glowforge in hand a 14 months after launch certainly has the right to be skeptical. Itās all sausage making. Messy. Untidy. Uncertain. We are all adults here (except for the many kids who use read this forum regularly so we watch our language). Let the marketplace of opinion rain down from the sky. We can all take our licks for what doesnāt measure up to expectations. I get a lot of energy and good will in my heart by reading the short bios of the Glowfolk on the mothership. They might have the greatest stake in the project. Can you imagine having on your resume, āI worked at Glowforge before it imploded and went bankrupt and didnāt deliverā.?
I had a personal experience of going down with the ship one time in my life. It was no fun. You can google me if you want. At least now my appearance at BAMF comes before the sinking of the Titanic.
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Just wondering. In my account information it states my ship date was October 13, 2017. Very exciting! Yet I have not received THE email yet. Should I expect the email in the next couple days? If this has already been addressed, Iām sorry! I need to pin down as close to possible when my unit will be delivered as I will be out of the country from November 6 to the 19th. Thank you for any insight.
For me it was the reverse. I got the email for the proofgrade, that it would arrive in a week. Then a few days later I got the tracking email for the glowforge, I got the email it was shipping and the package itself on the same day, and they both arrived before my proofgrade. Which came the next day.
Based out of Victoriaā¦
They seem to really focussed on the education market as the main distributor is 3D Printing Systems:
http://3dprintingsystems.com/emblaser-2/
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Funny to think about, knowing there might be just a handful that do, with all the delays I wonder if anyone has forgotten they ordered a GF as emails may go to spamā¦ I kinda dropped off the forms after Dec 2015. Now I am getting excited again and reading more on the forms, with the individual shipping information now displayed I could only be happier if I had already got my GF.
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You knowā¦ of course people are getting testy around here in GFland. we have been waiting and waiting. Waiting for something amazing.
I for one, am bummed I have missed out on using it all this time. Making some extra money, making cool stuff for personal use and gifts.
I will say as an engineer, who also has done QC for something much less complex than a GF, but still a couple thousand dollar tool, back in the mid 80ās. I am glad we had the delay.
Recall that they had to redesign the power supply? If they hadnāt figured that out when they did we would likely all be sitting around with dead GFās and be REALLY REALLY REALLY CRANKY, instead of you knowā¦ just cranky(note the lower case. 
) Or what if it had caused a fire or some such? Oooh boy I loved my GF right up until my house burned down.
Sure that sucked, but now it is much improved. That surely benefits us all. I mean we have seen people engrave paper for crying out loud. I donāt recall that being an original feature.
The part that caused one of the recent delays. How would we feel if that had been in the field when it was discovered? Oh swell send it back on the UPS magic destruction mystery ride, and have them fix it and return it? what would the survival be on TWO FREAKān round trips be?
I am anxiously awaiting my PRO. though I have to admit I have ALWAYS been anxiously awaiting it, my excitement for the possibilities has never waned. Much to the annoyance of my Wife and Daughters who now reply āwhenever the heck it actually gets hereā.
I still lobby for the idea that founders get a discount on the order of a second unit.
and I still look forward to my GFās arrival.
Chris
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Weāre hard at work delivering units - every day. We wonāt stop until we do.
Iām pretty sure we wonāt - but Iām passing your request along to the logistics team anyway.
I apologize; weāre not sharing any more information right now about it.
The total price is much less, since you paid a lower price for your basic, but are being credited with the current basic price towards the upgrade.
Early orders from a country will come before later orders from the same country. Early orders from international locations are a higher priority for us than later domestic orders, in the sense that we start working on them sooner and work harder on them - but they take longer. We wonāt stop shipping to waiting domestic customers just because weāre still blocked on an earlier international delivery.
The logistics, software, and operational requirements to make this happen are enormous, and would come at the expense of making sure the product continues to improve and ship reliably.
It was an experiment on our part to see if more transparency and detail - the request we get most often - would make people more or less satisfied. And youāre correct; the resources to do it had a small but measurable delay on projects that would have made the Glowforge software better and accelerated production.
Weāre still building the connections between the forecasting tool (that gives you the dates) and the actual process of notifying people (which, historically, happens once a week on a date that varies with factory production). That should help with date accuracy in the last week. But yes, it means you should be coming up soon.
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