Dear domino7,
I am not saying that it is unacceptable to put an experimental device or unfinished device for sale to keep a company going. A lot of startup companies do that. And many mature commercial or non-commercial entities do something similar or close to it such as selling non-assembled parts. Sometimes it is even a long-term business model, for example, in the do-it yourself market (Raspberry Pi, some Shuttle, Intel NUC kits series). A lot of them even use that as a marketing argument to build up some hype like “be among the first one to try this ground-breaking experimental …”. And it works. The ongoing almost finished DragonBox Pyra venture went even much further during prototyping.
What I think is wrong is to present a product to the public and the customer as a mature, non-experimental, retail available, third generation product and then let the customer discover that it is not at all and then, on top of that, not honoring the warranty (I will not talk here again about my customer service case, a moderator asked me to stop to write about it in multiple places, except in a short reminder mode, but believe me, it is really bad: before saying it is nothing, an isolated case, an exceptional case, that I should not ask for instant answers which I really, really did not (until they asked me to themselves), please read all my posts in this thread and answer there as the moderator asked and not here, thank you very much: FP3 reboots during phone calls).
If I were to do that, I couldn’t live with myself.
I am putting myself in the position of the Fairphone company (for more than one minute). Even if I personally don’t agree and wouldn’t have done it, that is why I can, on some level, “understand” that they didn’t release statistics during FP1, FP2 and the very beginning of FP3 (when they didn’t know how the FP3 faired, the time during which they could have called their products FP3 GAMMA TESTING “Be among the first to try the FP3 and be part of our exclusive GAMMA TESTING feedback program that include a 5% discount and an exclusive on-site/webcam visit of our headquarters with one our employees”). But now, there is no excuse anymore.
They either had success to achieve their aim at producing a fully-functional fair smartphone (that means with low defective products statistics) at the third attempt or they failed. If they failed, they have to take responsability (like every person, corporation or entity on the planet) and face three choices:
- keep presenting and selling their products as experimental ones
- find new additional investors and try one more time
- get out of business or restructure : yes, that is the one and only purpose of bankruptcy laws.
Not divulging statistics or whatever half-transparency politics will not change the numbers and the fact that the project is a either a success or a failure. It just means customers are kept in the dark, that’s all. And the sooner a bad fact gets out (preferably from the corporation itself by its own free will and with a good communication strategy), the better for that corporation to move on and even try to bounce back.
What I like in the USA is that, unlike certain european countries (including Switzerland, I don’t know about the Netherlands), bankrutpcy is not seen as a shameful horrible failure and ugly scar that requires to exile yourself somewhere nobody knows you (or at the other end of the planet for some villages or small towns in Switzerland). It is mostly seen as, yes a failure, but also something you learn from for your next venture.
Best regards,
Swiss-fairphone