Hi all! I tried to stay out of this entire discussion (like most non-technical discussions) for a long time.
But I think there is just a big misconception of how and what at least certain people percieve and what is actually going on. First of all, OpenMoko is a very small company. We have 19 full-time employees in Taipei, plus something like seven external people, mostly developers, not all of them full time. Now think about this. 19 people to do everything, from sales through software R&D, distribution, logistics, webshop, system administration, handling all external inquiries, business development, and so on. This does not include the hardware R&D team inside FIC Mobility, which is smaller than OpenMoko. Everybody in that team works overtime, for many months - even way before starting the 'phase 1' sales. So starting to sell those developer previews is something that drains every last resource that we have (and don't have). So please remember, this is an extremely small team, everyone doing the best he can, trying to create a completely new class of mobile device. Starting to sell those units to _interested developers_ who want to help building this device is something that puts a lot of additional load on us. The community has been pressing us to release those devices as early as possible, and that's what we did (after many mostly hardware R&D delays). So if you have any kind of inquiry, remember that you are one of more than 1000 other people who ordered in a very short timeframe. It's almost impossible to give any reasonable response. And if every of those > 1000 people inquire on the status of their order every day, then we don't get anything done (especially not processing the actual orders) but to respond to those status inquiries. I know this is a very insatisfactory situation. But please step back for a minute and think about this consumer-like attitude of complaints like "oh, you don't have the business process to handle orders". Yes, we don't have the business process. Yes, we don't have the people and/or resources. But: Yes, we're still doing it. Selling unfinished products to interested developers. Developers who have an idea how difficult this project is, and who want to help us moving forward with this project. But please don't think you're dealing with a multi-billion international company with a sales and customer support department. You are dealing with a bunch of [mostly technical] people who have a strange idea about what kind of difference they could achieve in the world of mobile devices. We have something like > 700 of your inquiries that nobody hasn't even had a time to look at yet. I'm not even talking about the > 800 inquiries that are somewhere being processed and have at least received one response. Oh, and don't think that hiring more people will help. Think about how long it takes for any new person to understand the process, and how much time you need to spend to teach them. The outcome would be visible at a time that phase-1 for GTA01 has long been finished. We're crazy because we're trying to do the impossible, with an impossibly small amount of resources, and an impossibly small team. So please understand that it's also impossible for us to respond to individual inquiries. You can place an order, you will get an order confirmation. We charge the credit card, you will get a confirmation that the payment has received. And you will get another message as soon as your shipping has been made. You can cancel at any point in time before the item is shipped by mailing CANCEL on an otherwise empty line to your ticket. But please don't try to change addresses, inquire about the status (which is clear based on the last mail you received), change the product quantity, credit card number, or whatever. Any such inquiry is bound to be responded in a way longer than acceptable timeframe, and will probably not have a satisfactory answer anyway, plus it will delay everythign else. Yes, this is no industry standard customer care. But hell, we are selling to developers inside our own community, not to end-users !?! Thanks for your understanding. -- - Harald Welte <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://openmoko.org/ ============================================================================ Software for the world's first truly open Free Software mobile phone _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
