Gameboy70
Member

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Metro Station, Hollywood and Highland
Posts: 1018 |
A sucker bet
quote: Originally posted by BrianX124
I bet you $20 its not vaporware. So what, they pushed the realese date back....what company doesn't? Just wait a little while and it will come out soon enough. Maybe they ran into a problem, would you rather have them realese it now with a unfixable by software problem and force you to send it back to them for a fix, thats pretty annoying. So just sit down, calm down, and stop accusing it of being a vaporware product.
Slacker' right. The SixPak was announced at InternetWorld in October of 1999, with a Q1 release projected. As March came to a close, Innogear shifted the release "date" to June, and not long afterwards, "Summer," then September. Right up into the end of September, Innogear told would-be customers that the SixPak would be shipping in two or three more weeks. Then in the middle of October Innogear informed us that the SixPak would be released in Q1 2001.
All of this is frustrating enough in and of itself, but Innogear's history with the MiniJam puts the SixPak delays in an even more discouraging context. One of the main features the MiniJam was supposed to include was voice recording -- which was nonchalantly dropped from the product description, after Innogear started taking preorders. One VC reader noticed that the voice recording feature was missing in the MiniJam's feature set on Innogear's website, and emailed the company to find out what happened. Innogear confirmed that the MiniJam would, indeed, not include voice recording.
See my "Conspiracy theory" post in this thread regarding Innogear's "accidental" dropping of voice recording from the product description of the SixPak on their FAQ page. When called on it, Innogear's alibi was, "we are completely rebuilding the web site, so possibly someting happened to the text data."
Voice recording depends on flash memory, which is one of the most affected parts in the industry-wide component shortage. So I think that Innogear was faced with three choices: raise the price of the SixPak, delay the SixPak until their (presumed) outstanding orders were fulfilled, or drop the feature altogether -- which is hard to do when your product's namesake is having six features. They've already changed the product description on their website for the "memory upgrade" feature from stating 8MB to not giving any amount of memory at all.
I could go on and on with more examples, but I'm sure you get the point. Needless to say, I'd be happy to take you up on that $20 bet.
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