element 14 for the win

RS are doing OK.

Remember that neither Farnell nor RS had any stock on Wednesday morning , so if Farnell sold anything then they sold a promise.

Quoting Raspberry Pi Foundation Weds at 6AM GMT:

"Although we are still waiting for units to arrive from China, you can start buying the Raspberry Pi today. We have entered into licensed manufacture partnerships with two British companies, Premier Farnell and RS Components. "

RS are now contacting those that registered interest to tell them that they will be able to order soon from the RS allocation. They did the right thing in my opinion, they didn't have stock to sell so they will only take payment when they do, and they will be able to do this in a more controlled and less frenzied manner.

It was obvious that the websites were going to get wiped out on Wednesday. The technology available at a component distributor is not ideal for these kind of releases. Ticketmaster would have been a better bet.

I say well done RS for their careful approach.

I don't like to point the finger at Raspberry_Pi, because their work so far with the publicity and the technical stuff has been brilliant. But that release chaos could have been done better.

RS are doing OK.

Remember that neither Farnell nor RS had any stock on Wednesday morning , so if Farnell sold anything then they sold a promise.

Quoting Raspberry Pi Foundation Weds at 6AM GMT:

"Although we are still waiting for units to arrive from China, you can start buying the Raspberry Pi today. We have entered into licensed manufacture partnerships with two British companies, Premier Farnell and RS Components. "

RS are now contacting those that registered interest to tell them that they will be able to order soon from the RS allocation. They did the right thing in my opinion, they didn't have stock to sell so they will only take payment when they do, and they will be able to do this in a more controlled and less frenzied manner.

It was obvious that the websites were going to get wiped out on Wednesday. The technology available at a component distributor is not ideal for these kind of releases. Ticketmaster would have been a better bet.

I say well done RS for their careful approach.

I don't like to point the finger at Raspberry_Pi, because their work so far with the publicity and the technical stuff has been brilliant. But that release chaos could have been done better.

Only trouble with that theory was the NZ version of RS, you couldn't find ANYTHING when searching, even 12 or 13 hrs after the main event.

At least NZ.Element14 had it, and you could find it, and order it.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and sure there are lessons to be learnt, but remember the organisation (as far as I can see) is mostly Engineers, and practical people, rather than Vapourware and Spin Doctors. The fact the units got held up probably didn't help their situation.

The forums seem to have a huge amount of question askers whom couldn't read or search, so I'm not sure that any type of information about pre ordering, etc would help.

To be fair to the suppliers, this has to be the first time they have encountered this level of interest, and does it justify the expense for the additional hardware and support for a device they are making a few bucks on...I don't think so.

From the flame throwing I saw on the forums, anyone who got static pages from the suppliers would have been equally vocal, so no win there either.

I am sure that the leadership will certainly be adding it to their forthcoming reviews to prevent a re-occurrance.

Mark

From the flame throwing I saw on the forums, anyone who got static pages from the suppliers would have been equally vocal, so no win there either.

Static pages can be very informative, Mark.  The "static" doesn't refer to them never changing, but only to the fact that the file served is a pure HTML file and requires no server-side processing between being requested and being sent.

A background process could be generating updated versions of that static file periodically and it would still be "static" from the PoV of the webserver, which would be able to serve a colossal number of requests without making the web service keel over.  If such a page were to contain the number of Raspberry Pi boards still in stock or still left to be allocated on pre-order, we would have witnessed a completely different outcome, happy customers and happy distributors.

Good system design makes all the difference between total success and a very embarrassing collapse.

Unfortunately that's not the design M.O. of your average webbie.  Instead it's "Oooh, this web framework is damn sexy", followed by "What, we crashed? Not my fault that we had too many customers!"  That's the reality of web service design today.

Morgaine.

 

The "static" doesn't refer to them never changing, but only to the fact that the file served is a pure HTML file and requires no server-side processing between being requested and being sent.

 

Thanks for that, very informative to someone who is on the 'static' side.

Instead it's "Oooh, this web framework is damn sexy",

I used to avoid sites that seemed to have a lot of that.

That was before we got broadband..

Cheers

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