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geekhack Marketplace => Vendor Forums => Matias => Topic started by: bcredbottle on Wed, 11 February 2015, 17:11:32
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Pre-ordered an Ergo Pro. Never buying from Matias again.
Shell out $200 for a keyboard. It's delayed over and over. Worse still, we barely ever get updates on when it'll come out. Pretty awful customer service experience. :'(
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Pre-ordered an Ergo Pro. Never buying from Matias again. Shell out $200 for a keyboard. It's delayed over and over. Worse still, we barely ever get updates on when it'll come out. Pretty awful customer service experience. :'(
I assume you’ve never pre-ordered a brand new hardware product before. :-) They’re pretty much always late, sometimes very very very late.
Basically, people who are risk-averse and need something today should just buy products from existing inventory. Pre-ordering brand new products from small companies is an inevitably time-risky proposition. Some Kickstarter hardware projects had delays of 2 years or more (!), and 6 months of delay for Kickstarter and similar hardware projects is on the fast side. Pre-ordering not-yet-finished products is for the super-fans and “early adopters”, who can stomach waiting 3x longer than originally expected, or getting a project slightly different than originally anticipated, etc.
The problem with building anything brand new is that there are hundreds of tiny decisions and steps, and the distribution of time the step takes relative to expected time has a long “tail”. Even if every single step time estimate is exactly the perfect average expected time that step should take, because of this distribution, a small handful of (sometimes trivial, sometimes not) steps ends up creating much bigger delays than anyone ever expects starting out. Of course, people usually estimate a little bit on the optimistic side, causing a further mismatch with real-world timings.
You see the same problem in any big coordinated projects: computer software, films, new vehicles, unique construction projects, etc. etc. Even one-man projects like novels or Ph.Ds usually take far longer than originally expected.
Timing in creating things only really starts to get predictable is when everything is well understood in advance, all the steps and relationships between steps are known, there are few decisions to be made along the way, the process has been done many times before, and nothing truly unexpected (like a natural disaster &c.) happens along the way. The more ambitious and new a project is, the more uncertainty there is, and the more the schedule tends to slip.
* * *
Anyway, part of your frustration may be that Matias has been leaving updates in various scattered places. Note that in the past month he was a week at CES and then scurrying around China to check on suppliers &c. His most recent post here on geekhack was two days ago:
[...] BTW, Ergo Pro production will be complete tomorrow. The Mac ones are already done. The PC ones will be ready tomorrow morning. I'll be posting pictures soon after. Thanks to everyone who so patiently waited!
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Pre-ordered an Ergo Pro. Never buying from Matias again.
Shell out $200 for a keyboard. It's delayed over and over. Worse still, we barely ever get updates on when it'll come out. Pretty awful customer service experience. :'(
Nice first post.
Just be glad you didn't pre order a Truly Ergonomic keyboard. The Truly Ergonomic people lied and lied and lied and even faked having multiple people doing the responses when there was only one, etc. And even when they apparently knew there would be big delays they just kept lying about expected ship times, blamed all sorts of other things, etc. And then when they finally did ship the boards had a slew of problems (just dig around the forums here). They had also promised software that never ended up happening, etc. Now THAT is bad customer service.
Matias has been pretty up-front about any delays from what I can tell and we're literally days away from them arriving and going out. I also don't expect any significant issues with this board as they spend a lot of time testing and getting things right _before_ they ship and they make a lot of other high quality boards. It will be worth the wait.
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Pre-ordered an Ergo Pro. Never buying from Matias again.
Shell out $200 for a keyboard. It's delayed over and over. Worse still, we barely ever get updates on when it'll come out. Pretty awful customer service experience. :'(
You are mad that you haven't received a product that's not in stock yet? That makes sense.
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Pre-ordered an Ergo Pro. Never buying from Matias again.
Shell out $200 for a keyboard. It's delayed over and over. Worse still, we barely ever get updates on when it'll come out. Pretty awful customer service experience. :'(
Nice first post.
Just be glad you didn't pre order a Truly Ergonomic keyboard. The Truly Ergonomic people lied and lied and lied and even faked having multiple people doing the responses when there was only one, etc. And even when they apparently knew there would be big delays they just kept lying about expected ship times, blamed all sorts of other things, etc. And then when they finally did ship the boards had a slew of problems (just dig around the forums here). They had also promised software that never ended up happening, etc. Now THAT is bad customer service.
Matias has been pretty up-front about any delays from what I can tell and we're literally days away from them arriving and going out. I also don't expect any significant issues with this board as they spend a lot of time testing and getting things right _before_ they ship and they make a lot of other high quality boards. It will be worth the wait.
I got a truly ergonomic on the very first pre-order run, yes it was delayed, yes it finally did come, and yes they also finally released the remapping software. Unfortunately I never got fully used to the alternate layout (would have been PERFECT had they just kept normal key positions but used the cool staggered keys), and I still have it boxed for resale.
This pre-order definitely feels similar; the delays don't surprise me and I'm sure we'll get them eventually.
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Pre-ordered an Ergo Pro. Never buying from Matias again.
Shell out $200 for a keyboard. It's delayed over and over. Worse still, we barely ever get updates on when it'll come out. Pretty awful customer service experience. :'(
You are mad that you haven't received a product that's not in stock yet? That makes sense.
No, I'm mad that Matias took my money claiming I would get a piece of the first production run, and I just got an e-mail telling me I got bumped down to the second production run. So it's delayed again, now by over a month. Oh, and I only found out about it because I badger them with e-mails. Yes, I was stupid to pre-order from a small company that I now see is totally incompetent. Still salty about it, though.
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Pre-ordered an Ergo Pro. Never buying from Matias again.
Shell out $200 for a keyboard. It's delayed over and over. Worse still, we barely ever get updates on when it'll come out. Pretty awful customer service experience. :'(
You are mad that you haven't received a product that's not in stock yet? That makes sense.
No, I'm mad that they took my money claiming I would get a piece of the first production run, and I just got an e-mail telling me I got bumped down to the second production run. So it's delayed again, now by over a month. Oh, and I only found out about it because I badger them with e-mails. Yes, I was stupid to pre-order from a small company that I now see is totally incompetent. Still salty about it, though.
I'm sorry you feel this way. With new products that go far beyond the normal spec of a standard keyboard, it's often difficult to know exactly when they'll be finished. We do our best to estimate, but even small problems can lead to long delays.
With this one, we had the added burden of needing to design special keycaps and palm supports and gels, and ensure that they all fit together comfortably -- which led to complications that needed to be sorted out. We also made changes to the design that were requested by posters on GeekHack and Twitter... DIP switches for swapping Caps Lock/Ctrl, Left/Right Spacebar -> Backspace, and setting PC/Mac layouts.
Ultimately, we felt that the most important thing was for the final shipping product to be as good as it could possibly be, and that the delay would be worth it.
I do get a lot of pressure from our customer service people to finish projects on time -- since they are the ones who primarily deliver the bad news when delays happen, and suffer the ire of disappointed/upset/angry customers. I'm happy to say that the Ergo Pro customers displayed very little of this -- most by far were very understanding.
In any case, if you feel you were treated badly, you should request a refund. When dealing with companies, it's always best to vote with your dollars.
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I would be happy if mods have this bcrapbottle banned.
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Isn't customer service great, Matias? ;) Seriously though, thank you for keeping everybody updated and being so level headed about your detractors. If there wasn't so much information here about the product and the process, I wouldn't have pre-ordered an Ergo Pro. So, thanks!
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Isn't customer service great, Matias? ;) Seriously though, thank you for keeping everybody updated and being so level headed about your detractors. If there wasn't so much information here about the product and the process, I wouldn't have pre-ordered an Ergo Pro. So, thanks!
Thanks, anonymity does tend to bring out the worst in people...
I would be happy if mods have this bcrapbottle banned.
That would be up to the mods.
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I would be happy if mods have this bcrapbottle banned.
It's easy to be level-headed when you don't give a ****.
Most all of us hear take keyboards very seriously but delays are a fact of life and your responses aren't going to benefit anyone.
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I would be happy if mods have this bcrapbottle banned.
It's easy to be level-headed when you don't give a ****.
Most all of us hear take keyboards very seriously but delays are a fact of life and your responses aren't going to benefit anyone.
I'm sorry, but they're not a fact of life. I'm an attorney, and if I missed a deadline for a client, I would be fired on the spot. Matias just doesn't care. If he had spent half the time he spends on promotion on actually making sure the product gets out, he would have delivered on time. It's just unbelievable what a laissez faire attitude he carries about doing his job correctly.
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I would be happy if mods have this bcrapbottle banned.
It's easy to be level-headed when you don't give a ****.
Most all of us hear take keyboards very seriously but delays are a fact of life and your responses aren't going to benefit anyone.
I'm sorry, but they're not a fact of life. I'm an attorney, and if I missed a deadline for a client, I would be fired on the spot. Matias just doesn't care. If he had spent half the time he spends on promotion on actually making sure the product gets out, he would have delivered on time. It's just unbelievable what a laissez faire attitude he carries about doing his job correctly.
I don't think you'll find any other keyboard company who will deal directly with there customers like Matias does. That shows how much they care about customers, to me that means much more than releasing a substandard product.
Perhaps you would have been better off purchasing a Microsoft ergo keyboard.
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I'm sorry, but they're not a fact of life. I'm an attorney, and if I missed a deadline for a client, I would be fired on the spot.
You know why? Because lawyers have a job where finishing on time makes a life-or-death difference, so for an attorney it’s 100x better to turn in a shoddy product on time than a perfect product 2 days late. Lawyers are socialized their whole lives (first school, then college, then law school) to do everything on time, or else. The junior lawyers I know at major firms aren’t necessarily the smartest among my friends, but they work their asses off, and they sacrifice everything (family, friends, exercise, sleep) to finish crazy unsustainably massive piles of paperwork on time. A few of them average about 5 hours of sleep per night for weeks on end.
From that baseline, anything less seems “unprofessional”. But the fact is, if you’re an attorney, you don’t face the same kinds of delays that a brand new hardware project faces. You just don’t. When dealing with a big chain of hardware suppliers, unexpected and unavoidable delays just happen sometimes, and there’s nothing you can do about it: 1 week here, 3 weeks there, BAM, gone. You can hedge up front by making a less optimistic estimate, but that’s hard to do precisely. You can sometimes push the schedule harder by accepting sub-standard parts, but Matias seems to have some perfectionist tendencies that would make that impossible to accept. (And most of us are glad for it, because we care more about the quality of a product we might use for decades than a few weeks delay at the start.)
If you want something on a rigidly predictable schedule, pre-ordering brand new products is not the way to go. Just go down to Best Buy and buy something off their shelf, and you can have something in your hands within an hour.
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I don't know... I don't think he is an attorney. If he was one, he wouldn't be a very good one. Just read his posts.
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I don't know... I don't think he is an attorney. If he was one, he wouldn't be a very good one. Just read his posts.
Well, if you google bcredbottle (http://www.google.ca/search?q=bcredbottle), you'll see that his Reddit account has been deleted.
Not sure what you have to do to get yourself kicked off Reddit. Seems like anything goes there.
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I don't know... I don't think he is an attorney. If he was one, he wouldn't be a very good one. Just read his posts.
Well, if you google bcredbottle (http://www.google.ca/search?q=bcredbottle), you'll see that his Reddit account has been deleted.
Not sure what you have to do to get yourself kicked off Reddit. Seems like anything goes there.
Please don't stalk me. It's unsettling, especially because you're Canadian.
Also, I would appreciate it if the mods would do something about the obvious trolls in this forum who are attacking my character.
Oh, I forgot. Edgar moderates this forum. That's why my thread about the Ergo Pro was deleted. I guess he can't take the negative exposure.
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Also, I would appreciate it if the mods would do something about the obvious trolls in this forum [...]
LOL. If you keep pushing your luck, I’m sure geekhack mods would be happy to ban you. Hopefully that won’t be necessary though.
Oh, I forgot. Edgar moderates this forum. [...] I guess he can't take the negative exposure.
Dude, take your bad attitude somewhere else. This is the “Matias vendor forum”. In other words, he’s the host here, and you’re the guest.
If your only purpose is to talk ****, find your own venue for it. (Ideally somewhere other than geekhack. This is a community site, and you seem to have no interest in community or conversation.)
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AFAIK only users themselves delete their accounts at Reddit. bcredbottle posted the same kind of thread there, and got downvoted to oblivion.
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I don't know... I don't think he is an attorney. If he was one, he wouldn't be a very good one. Just read his posts.
I don't know... I don't think he is an attorney. If he was one, he wouldn't be a very good one. Just read his posts.
Well, if you google bcredbottle (http://www.google.ca/search?q=bcredbottle), you'll see that his Reddit account has been deleted.
Not sure what you have to do to get yourself kicked off Reddit. Seems like anything goes there.
Also, I would appreciate it if the mods would do something about the obvious trolls in this forum [...]
LOL. If you keep pushing your luck, I�m sure geekhack mods would be happy to ban you. Hopefully that won�t be necessary though.
Oh, I forgot. Edgar moderates this forum. [...] I guess he can't take the negative exposure.
Dude, take your bad attitude somewhere else. This is the �Matias vendor forum�. In other words, he�s the host here, and you�re the guest.
If your only purpose is to talk ****, find your own venue for it. (Ideally somewhere other than geekhack. This is a community site, and you seem to have no interest in community or conversation.)
I don't know... I don't think he is an attorney. If he was one, he wouldn't be a very good one. Just read his posts.
Thank you all for your comments. I am collecting them for a study I am conducting on inferior websites.
I am a representative (moderator) from a website that specializes in the development and careful curation of memes. You may have heard of it, it’s called Reddit. Specifically, I am a moderator of reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards (http://reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards) and reddit.com/r/redditarmie (http://reddit.com/r/redditarmie). We at Reddit have evolved past the concept of internet “message boards” to a system based on upvotes and downvotes. We also communicate almost exclusively through memes and still images from Parks and Recreation, a TV show that only true intellectuals will understand.
We have decided to study the posting habits of inferior websites that still maintain the message board format. Thus, this persona was created to explore your communication styles.
I meant no ill will to any of you, though it seems Edgar has much to learn about commitment and accountability.
Yours truly,
bCredBottle
Public intellectual, scholar, meme-maker, and squad leader in Le Reddit Armie
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Congratulations, bcredbottle. I’ve added you to my “ignore list”, meaning your posts no longer show up for me. You’re only the third person I’ve bothered to ignore, so that puts you in rare company, a true elite made up of those forum members who (a) have nothing useful to say whatsoever, and (b) manage to say it in an obnoxious way. At this point, carry on spewing whatever you want to spew. Since I won’t be seeing it, it’s someone else’s problem.
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Your trolling here was weak, bcredbottle, but I see that has not always been the case:
http://www.reddit.com/r/RedditArmie/comments/2v9r9q/serious_thank_you_all_so_much/
I honestly don't know what's true here. Are you dying? Were you banned at reddit, or did you delete your account?
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Haters' gonna hate. bcrapbottle's gonna crap.
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Haters' gonna hate. bcrapbottle's gonna crap.
Your misuse of the apostrophe indicates that you are anything but a scholar.
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Haters' gonna hate. bcrapbottle's gonna crap.
Your misuse of the apostrophe indicates that you are anything but a scholar.
Look who's typing. You must have failed in school in more ways than one. You don't even know what you are talking about. Are you taking both a reddit day job and a lawyer night job to pay for your student loan? Or do you just don't know how to invest to get better return than your student loan's interest rate? Maybe you should just ask your girlfriend's grandpa to loan you some money. He knows what a real job is.
You should just GTFO and stop embarrassing yourself.