Quote:
Originally Posted by rob
We view pre-orders as something that we're not in a position to do successfully right now. Pre-orders represent a potential customer relations issue that we don't want to risk right now. Even though we've been around for 16 years, we're still a tiny company. When you accept pre-orders, you establish an expectation by the customer that you'll deliver what's been paid for within a "reasonable" timeframe.
Here's where it gets difficult, though. Everyone has a different definition of "reasonable", and there are customers out there who will widely and publicly decry someone of "ripping them off" if the company doesn't satisfy their definition of "reasonable". This creates a great deal of pressure on the company to promise concrete dates and release something *on* that date, even if the release is premature (i.e. buggy or incomplete). I'm sure you've all seen many examples of this with computer games and other software.
Because we're tiny and we strive for high quality in what we release, our release dates are targets we're pushing for, but they are not concrete. External factors can (and often do) arise that derail progress temporarily or we could run into technical issues (or simply unexpected bugs) that take longer to solve properly. Either way, it's a definite reality that we could miss a release date, which is why we try not to quote dates when we can avoid it.
Our goal is to keep customers happy and spreading the word about our products. The best way to do that is to produce a high quality product and avoid establishing expectations that we can't deliver on. Consequently, we don't believe pre-orders to be prudent right now. While we'd love to do them in principle, they just don't make good sense for us at the moment.
Hope this explanation makes sense....
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Hi, Rob. Yep, that makes sense to me... but that could be because I'm in the high tech, client-facing, deliver-or-die sphere. Under-promise and over-deliver is the safest way to do business.
FWIW - thank you for explaining your business rationale. It's great to see candor in a field where most companies opt for the "we can't do it and we can't tell you why" answer.
At the risk of getting you to commit to a date... how is HL 3.6 coming? Still on track for release at some point this week?