The delays they are encountering are entirely what I would expect for a first time offshoring effort. They probably had no problem designing the initial prototype, but they probably were setting up to have it manufactured somewhere in China, and I'll bet there were quite a few discrepancies and/or mild design flaws that meant they had to iterate... Iterating on design/manufacturing issues with a company overseas is PAINFUL unless you have staff in the manufacturing center to interface with their staff. I have been through this a couple of times, and it can be a real killer; for smaller production runs the cost of setup overseas easily can eat the cost advantages. Also, a 6 week turnaround for a design change isn't that surprising, and would explain all of TE's delays.
We use China based manufacturing very frequently in our business. But as you say, for small production runs it is quite likely it will actually cost more to make it in China due to the various issues. For first runs (unless the quantity is huge), or for small runs, we always use local facilities. After the product is established, then we switch to China.
At issue here though is a design change made at the last minute not having anything to do with it being made in China or not. Granted, if it is made in China, the change may bring even more delay, but the manufacturing has already been delayed for at least 8 months, which is way beyond any delays due to it being made in China should have caused. Evidently the board does not work properly with different computers/OS's, and to solve the problem dip switches were added. My problem with this is that this problem should have been identified very early on and corrected. Let me explain in detail my position on this.
For simplicity sake, there are two types of people who attempt to develop and market consumer electronics - Realists and Perfectionists. Perfectionists however do not belong in the consumer electronics business and they will almost always flat out fail right from the start, unless they quickly realize their error and switch to being a Realist. The Realist realizes that for all but the most basic of electronics, employing firmware as part of the product, you can never make a perfect product. There will always be some sort of bug in the firmware, and if the product interfaces with a PC, there will always be compatibility issues. He realizes that you can never make the product 100% perfect, or if you could, it would take years and years to accomplish and huge sums of money. He realizes that there is a threshold - a balance of spending time/money on debugging a product, and making it as good as possible to be useable by the maximum number of users.
This threshold will vary depending on a lot of factors, of which the size/resources of the company, as well as the size of the market for the product are key. For a company's first ever product, designed with a very narrow market in mind, and by a one-man or very small company, this threshold may be quite low. This doesn't mean the product should fail for everyone who tries to use it, or that the product fails after being used for a short period of time. Those issues do need to be worked out. But if the product let's say is incompatible with a certain range of PCs, which eliminates let's say 20% of the market, that has to be factored in with how much time/money it will cost to make it compatible with most or all of that remaining 20%. There is nothing wrong with introducing a product along with a disclaimer that it is incompatible with certain equipment, so that the consumer is aware of this issue before making a purchase.
In this particular case, a realist would look at the situation, and even if the keyboard would only work with PCs running Windows, but could be gotten to market quickly, I would think they would make that decision. And worry about Mac and Linux compatibility for version 2 of the board. If 80% of your market is PC Windows, but you delay by many months the product introduction in order to get more of the remaining 20%, you'll likely lose out on many of your Windows customers due to your delay. It simply doesn't make economic sense. Of course from the end-user standpoint, we always want it to work with our system and complain loudly about companies who release products with limited compatibility. But the reality of the marketplace is that for low quantity items designed by small firms with limited resources, this is often the only sensible way to go.
When I first started out in the consumer electronics business, I was a perfectionist myself. I learned very quickly though that I had to become a realist. The budget for my first product was rapidly running out, and I was far from producing the final product. So immediately I had to drop all my wild plans for 100% compatibility, and concentrate on a core product that was reasonably bug-free and useable by a slightly reduced target market. We tested the product a reasonable amount, and fixed the bugs/problems we could find. When the product was released, we had a small number of returns, which was very acceptable, and reports of bugs/problems from the field which we fixed in later releases, and the product was quite successful.
Of course, if you're in the market of selling aircraft navigation electronics, medical monitoring equipment, or any critical piece of electronics where lives are at stake, then this approach will absolutely not work. In that case you do want a perfectionist or someone near that level working on your products. And your greatly increased development time/costs will naturally be reflected in the increased cost to the end user.
So with regard to this Truly Ergonomic product, I see the likely cause of the production delays being one of two things:
1) The owner is a perfectionist and has no prior experience in making consumer electronics to know that his approach will never work. He will flat out fail unless he becomes a realist.
2) The owner is probably a one-man operation (or maybe a single worker to help him out), and is trying to do this with very limited resources and has gotten in over his head. He way underestimated what it takes to get a product to market, and may very well be running out of funds. If so, he may not even be devoting all his time and resources to this as he may need to make money by other means, such as a job, or selling other products. So without being able to devote his full resources to this, the product will see more and more delays.
If number 1 is the case, we will never see the finished product, because it is impossible to make something 100% perfect, and the owner will run out of money or someone else will beat him to the market.
If number 2 is the case, eventually we may see the board produced, if he doesn't run out of money or ambition first, but some may question the quality of the finished product if it's being produced by someone with no prior experience in this field or in manufacturing. I know I would have reservations in that case.
Not trying to come down too hard on Truly Ergonomics, as I really would like to see them succeed with this product, as I do believe there is likely a market niche for this and would like to personally try one out. Just speaking from first-hand experience, I have my doubts about the viability of them being able to produce a real marketable product.
