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There are just too many things piling up and not enough clear honest communication. I’m a day 1 Pro order in the US and still haven’t received my email.
- I see a thread posted in Problems and Support get locked with a terse response from @dan
- I see a banner on the forum that has no “last updated” timestamp but has reflected the same info for a couple of weeks but then Dan say that they’re updating “at least once a week”.
- I see posts on Facebook from people asking “when are you shipping?” with enthusiastic responses from GlowForge saying “we’re shipping now!” and continuing to claim that new orders will be delivered by November.
- I see barely a trickle of new posts or updates to the spreadsheet stating folks have received their email or their unit, and those all appear to be basic units.
- I see GlowForge at Maker Faires touting the device and continuing to make promises of delivery to new customers by November.
- I see posts about damaged units and ‘acceptable’ cosmetic issues being explained away, while I see other Facebook posts that have responses from GlowForge stating clearly that they are now shipping final production units.
Things just don’t add up. In two days it will be two years since I ordered.
Please, no “I’m sorry, we let you down” responses or “well you can just cancel” responses. I also don’t want to hear “they aren’t required to divulge specific shipping volumes or internal timelines or other sensitive company info” – I’m not asking for those things. It’s time for GlowForge to be up front and honest with what’s going on.
Feeling hugely disrespected as a customer.
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I’ve been waiting very patiently. I’m not even that upset that there have been so many, many delays. I’m along for the ride. I’ve been enjoying this forum. Delaying gratification can be good for the soul. Building this thing well takes time, and they calculated it wrong. I completely made my peace with that.
I’m making an assumption just from reading reports from current users: the software is incomplete and buggy. The camera is not aligning things accurately. The usable space is temporarily smaller, many features like continuous auto focus, auto align when flipping, pass through alignment, kerf management, auto detect objects, etc etc etc. it’s very incomplete. I know it’s coming, but there is no schedule as far as I can see. Could this be well into next year? Certainly. Probably. No way to know.
I’ve been thinking about the state of the software, and the reports of such incomplete and error prone software is really upsetting me. I expected that when they extended the schedule to work on the hardware and logistics and packaging and shipping, they gained way more than a year in extra software development time. They should have hired an extra developer if they were all hands on the hardware deck. By now, the punch list of original advertised functions would be tested and deployed, and they would be half way through that “hopper”. Slip the date, add to the project plan.
Again, I’m not complaining about the delay. But I’m in SW development. I see it as very poor project management to be so behind on the software. Really. I totally see how the hardware was harder then they thought, and some of the software. The developers had this original list more than 2 years ago with the original deadline. The head of software was given the gift of time. It’s amazing when that happens. If it were me, I’d never release a long delayed product with the software in this condition. I’d staff to the plan. Add developers to meet the deadlines. Still work like hell, not stretch the same tasks to the new timeline. I’m just not satisfied with production-quality software being promised “some time” in the future. I wouldn’t even bring it up if they were even close to on time.
On the software front, it's interesting to note that their co-founder focused on software left the company about a month ago: