Ok, this is a pure rage rant. I’m really sick of companies paper launching products that are totally unavailable to customers for months. Last November I made a blogpost about the Nokia N900, which I finally ordered. On the paper it’s still the best Linux-based phone which has the greatest compatibility with my Fedora boxes.
Today I received an e-mail telling me that my N900 would probably be delivered mid-February. That would be almost 3 months since I paid and of course you don’t get any money back on the price drop that occurs during this period…how screwed is that? It wasn’t even a pre-order, the N900 was “available”. Nokia, if you can’t deliver a product to your customers, fucking don’t sell it if you have no stock! I’m so fed up of these lousy business practices.
Nokia are not the only to blame, nVidia and ATI behave exactly the same when they launch new lines of graphic cards. Whose fault is it? The marketing guys? I honestly don’t see how generating hype on a product and not delivering it for months will help you. All you gain are angry customers who lost money on pre-orders and all the buzz effect is gone once the product really hits the streets. Great job!
On the other hand you have Apple, they have a sense on how to deliver products to the market. When a product is announced, it’s available. Guess what? They are doing fine.
If they do drop the price, you’re more than within your rights to get a refund and order again. Just calling them up and explaining this logic to them might get you the partial refund without having to go to the back of the queue.
And in fairness to Nokia, their preorder policy is pretty awesome:
a) you don’t pay until being dispatched
b) you pay the lowest price between your order and dispatch
These are common sense but I’m sure a lot of companies don’t follow them without the customer prompting action.
Note that I did buy the device trough a Nokia reseller, you can’t directly buy from them in Switzerland. So the policy isn’t really that nice…the reseller is more than happy to have a bigger margin this way. In any case, i cancelled my order today…I’ll probably order the N900 again when it will be available. Btw, this is only an example to illustrate a lousy practice that you often see in the “high tech” world.
Well, doesn’t it remind you of Google’s hype over Wave when it was still “closed up”, and the invites trickling down for about a month before it… uh? I haven’t heard of Wave in the past three months or so, I wonder if it’s alright…
I feel with you….ordered it quite a while ago and it’s becoming later and later to become available. I’m already looking out for alternatives now.