Just to be clear, this is not a question on asking for delivery dates, but a question on HOW status is/will be/could be communicated to clients trying to buy an RPi.
As it stands, most clients who have ordered have seen the the "expected ship date" on the item page from Farnell/Newark. This date changes regularly, and with issues like to RJ45 port and sourcing problems, it gives a bit of a measure of when clients can expect to have theirs.
However, the date on the item page is rather "one-dimensional". I would believe that anyone ordering today would look at the date and say "okay buy mid-March, receive end-July". But who does this date apply to? Does it mean that every order other than the first 10k is expected in July?
Anyways, you can see that I am just trying to get some transparency. I am sure that Farnell/Newark by now could get their sales dept to make a list of all orders made with date/time and determine how may they need and then start allocating future production plans to filling orders within the Farnell network. This way, at least internally, Farnell could figure that a specific customer order is #24129 out of 156196 which means that they would receive an RPi out of the 1st batch of 50000 or the 3rd batch of 10000, etc. Then when a client checks his order status, he could get more than "back-ordered".
I really do understand that no one is really clear on what is happening at this exact moment, but is someone working on how to better inform the clients of their individual status?
