Scott: Scott: And why would you insist on feature parity on a product that is 4 years late and never reached General Release? Why isn’t 80% parity good enough for General Release?

It all depends on the specifics.

There are 24 letters in the (English) alphabet. I would be 0% satisfied with a keyboard that nailed 80% of those but failed 20%. I just can’t imagine life without the letter ‘r’.

Scott: Scott: Just like why would you scrap your firmware that from TREG reports was generally stable and worked. How in the world does WayTools make business decisions? They make no sense to me.

I’m 100%+ satisfied with my TextBlade test unit as-is. I’ll even tell you that’s an understatement.

But @waytools has explained clearly that there are business reasons that shipping the existing firmware is not a good idea from a general release and supportability point of view. They’ve said that this awesome enthusiastic response (much better than earlier firmware versions) proves to them that the feature set is great, but that they feel the need to provide that same feature set (parity) in a more sustainable architecture.

So they are making reasonable business decisions step by step. Us watching, without knowing all the factors, and with the additional benefit of several years of hindsight*, can second guess or disagree with those decisions without the need to say they are not making business-based decisions. I’ve always thought the Google model of an extended chaotic beta phase would have been an interesting and exciting way to launch and build up enthusiasm for Textblade even though problems and issues and crisis would have surfaced along the way. But even though I know slightly more than a non tester I know massively less than Waytools about all of the factors involved, including the hardware & production dimensions that were not a part of the google launch. More importantly I know that as a startup @waytools has ONE SHOT to get things right in terms of launching a successful business, and their choice of how to play the rollout game has to be between them and possibly any investors.

Scott: Scott: And why would you insist on feature parity on a product that is 4 years late and never reached General Release?

*Finally, it’s a total straw man to second guess Waytool’s decisions as if it was a preplanned multiyear extension program. No matter what your interpretation of the past few years it is abundantly clear that at each moment in time they were making decisions based on existing circumstances and the reality of the time it is taking to get it to a stage where they feel they can release it in the right way to the market is not the original timeline they had planned. In my opinion the idea that it was a premeditated plan from day 1 to have the sequence of events which occurred is really just conspiracy thinking.