element 14 for the win

Element14 and Farnell certainly did very much better than their commercial competitor, but to be fair, this launch was one that the Raspberry Pi Foundation will want to forget as soon as possible.  I wrote up a review of the day's painful events on G+ here:

https://plus.google.com/117463006296185212823/posts/RHZMDDKs3V5

I think what's important now is that the Foundation recognizes that things didn't go as planned, learns from its mistakes, and moves rapidly into Phase 2 to put this new-found industrial muscle to work.  Many hundreds of thousands of devices are needed even now in this initial hobbiest / development phase, and millions more once Rpi hits the educational bigtime.  There is much work to be done by all three partners.

And from our community end there is much work to be done as well, turning the Rpi ecosystem into something vibrant, innovative, educational, and inspiring.  But for that we need boards. :-)

Morgaine.

This launch was one that the Raspberry Pi Foundation will want to forget as soon as possible.

Sure. They introduced a product that was met with such overwhelming demand, that the web sites of the two distributors - in spite of their previous assurances that they could take the beating - virtually disappeared for hours. What a flop!

I am old enough to remember many computer products which met with overwhelming demand upon being launched, and customers had to wait for months before getting theirs. I don't remember anyone describing these events as colossal failures up to now.

My understanding is that the Pi foundation had to deal with suits from Farnel and RS, not with techies. This was a problem for two reasons: a) the suits probably had no clue that the Pi was going to be something big. ("Sure, we have this startup that claims their product will rock the world and our infrastructure will collapse under the weight of the demand. Ha!"). b) Even if the suits had had a clue that the demand would be enormous, they had no clue what to do about it TECHNICALLY. My guess is that the "webbies" whom you vilify had little if any idea aabout what was coming. If they had, they could have done a few simple things, which would not even involve infrastructure investments - such as providing the foundation with links to the exact pages where customers would place orders. They didn't do this, and customers had to search, navigate or float in the semi-dead sites, resulting in a tenfold increase of traffic.

This certainly wasn't the foundation's fault - it is obvious from the twitter feeds that they were unable to even communicate with the panicked distributors for hours on end. It was also definitely not the "webbies'" fault. What it was is a failure on the part of the suits running Farnell and RS. Hopefully they have learned something from the experience, although it is quite possible that the failure is at a more fundamental level - in the structure of these companies - and therefore much harder to fix.

Still, in the grand scale of things this is unimportant. The Pi was launched with a bang, the world took notice, and I 'm sure that within a few months all the problems will be ironed out. "A few months" may sound like a lot, but then again, Rome was not built in a day, neither was the Pi. Sure I would have liked to be able to order 10 Pis today and have them within a week or two, but that's not the way it is.

The Raspberry Pi isn't a flop, nobody said it was.  Quite the opposite, it's wildly successful, interest couldn't be higher.

The launch in contrast was an utter disaster of biblical proportions, making half the prospective buyers across the planet either interrupt their work day or their sleep, frustrating their attempts for several hours, denying them the ability to order or even pre-order, not providing them with information on the state of sales so they didn't know whether the 10k units had gone or they should continue trying, and creating a general sense of panic and huge disatisfaction as seen on the Twitter channel.

The launch wasn't just bad, it was a failure in every respect, failure in planning, and failure in execution.  The fact that the 10k units got sold when the number of interested parties was probably several hundred thousand isn't a sign of success.  That they would be sold rapidly was blatantly obvious to anyone with half a brain cell.  This kind of calamitous event was not required to get them sold.  Many others have suggested ways in which the initial batch could have been released in a controlled fashion instead of making server overload a near certainty by specifying an exact time.

Will this matter in the long run?  No, as long as all three parties learn from the experience and don't repeat it.  But learning requires accepting that failure occurred, and comments suggesting that all went well are quite surreal.

Morgaine.

The Raspberry Pi isn't a flop, nobody said it was.  Quite the opposite, it's wildly successful, interest couldn't be higher.

The launch in contrast was an utter disaster of biblical proportions, making half the prospective buyers across the planet either interrupt their work day or their sleep, frustrating their attempts for several hours, denying them the ability to order or even pre-order, not providing them with information on the state of sales so they didn't know whether the 10k units had gone or they should continue trying, and creating a general sense of panic and huge disatisfaction as seen on the Twitter channel.

The launch wasn't just bad, it was a failure in every respect, failure in planning, and failure in execution.  The fact that the 10k units got sold when the number of interested parties was probably several hundred thousand isn't a sign of success.  That they would be sold rapidly was blatantly obvious to anyone with half a brain cell.  This kind of calamitous event was not required to get them sold.  Many others have suggested ways in which the initial batch could have been released in a controlled fashion instead of making server overload a near certainty by specifying an exact time.

Will this matter in the long run?  No, as long as all three parties learn from the experience and don't repeat it.  But learning requires accepting that failure occurred, and comments suggesting that all went well are quite surreal.

Morgaine.

It seems that there will be some time before the initial demand for Pis is satisfied. It is even quite possible that, due to the media attention, this demand will even increase.

It also seems that the Pi foundation plans to relase the hardware design (schematics, Gerber files etc).

If they do it soon enough, all those who believe they could have done it better than the foundation, will be able to try their hand at it - arrange with a Chinese factory to manufacture 20.000 Pis for you (or 200.000), and you can properly launch them, to show the foundation and the world how it is done. You may even get some pocket money out of it, if you really do it properly.

Then the foundation, relieved to find out that the production/launch/distribution of their brainchild is in good hands, will be able to concentrate on what it does best (to the best of my knowledge, they never claimed to be expert salesmen).

:-)

:-)

Interesting point, alfon1917.  Are Farnell and RS in competition with each other on Raspberry Pi, or do they adopt a common product policy in the manner of a cartel and don't try to out-do each other?

Either way, if neither of them commissions large batches to reduce the per-unit manufacturing cost and maintain stock, but instead if they both only trickle-feed the Rpi community by building to order using their "Register your interest" lists, then there will be ample room for a competitor to out-do them once the manufacturing information is available.

They will lose out badly to anyone who manufactures larger batches for stock, both on price and on convenience.  Nobody likes to wait 1-2 months, or however long it takes to order and manufacture a batch of boards to order, every time they want another board.

If you want an Arduino, a few clicks of your browser and it's on your doorstep the following day.  Farnell and RS are excellent at providing such next-day service (Farnell UK commonly holds over 1,000 Arduino Unos in stock), so if neither company does this for Raspberry Pi, there will clearly be something very amiss.