If only it was as simple as using personal time and emotion invested as a large part of the equation that determined a softwares value... we would all be rich :)
This article is just like all the e-mail updates they send. Long winded excuses with no results. "X is broken, we are trying to fix it so that we live up to our high standard. We are excited to see what is next and will ship soon."
They have been singing the same song for 2+ years.
Personally I could care less about their delays. My beef with the company is that EVERY update they lead on customers, saying "We're almost there!". No, you're not.
They're terrible with providing updates. I'm amazed. My dashboard still says that my unit is anticipated to ship in May 2014, and this is far from the first time they've gone past the shipping estimate without a word to me.
How hard is it to write some code that checks for shipping estimates that are about to become false, updates them, and notifies the people in question?
The only reason I bought this initially is because the YC team made a comment like "we've been using this for a while and it's awesome". It made me believe they had already done a lot of testing on the product, and that it was in production use.
After the first year it became clear the Lockitron was just an idea. I have no idea why the YC team made a testimonial for it as if it were a finished product.
The second year the e-mail updates were constantly "X is wrong and we are fixing it. We want to make the best product possible." Blah blah. Yeah, whatever.
What it comes down to is that Lockitrons entire campaign was misleading, from their website, to the YouTube videos, to the Kickstarter -- the entire company is smoke and mirrors. The company is really good at explaining why things are wrong, but is terrible at actually fixing them. My frustration stems from them constantly promising things, but missing their deadlines by months, and in this case, years. Not once, but several times.
I cancelled my order a while ago, the Lockitron brand is destroyed in my mind, and I have been hesitant to back any hardware projects ever since.
Question for you for goldenkey below: Do you mean YC or HN?
The YC team, while growing, is still a fairly small collective of amazingly brilliant people. The HN team is, at the end of the day, largely anonymous people on the internet. (Albeit the most amazingly brilliant collective of largely anonymous people on the internet I've ever come across.)
It would be nice if pg had said something closer to "I hope this new product works as well as the version we are using", but it's difficult to go back and try to figure out the context he would have been commenting in.
The preorder page from that time does paint the picture of a well developed product, making declarations about all the things Lockitron does:
Out of curiosity: if they weren't YC, would you be more or less skeptical of the claim? I'm wondering whether you bought it because you believed the team (based on your understanding of the problem and solution) or because you believed in YC
I bought it because of YC comments. I was sorely disappointed when the wifi unlock did not work like it was stated because of the battery drain. I returned it and have just made my own with a wired arduino. Faster, instant unlock, and no batteries to worry about :)
I'm also curious to hear the answer to this question. Last time I applied, it was only with an idea that had not yet been implemented. Now, I am waiting to see if my current idea has traction before applying to YC. I think they see traction as a very important factor in accepting you into YC. I might be wrong though.
I have no experience with HN personally but I remember pg saying they tried to ignore early signs of traction, as there's no correlation between how far a company is when it's accepted, and how well it ends up doing.
