Going once, going twice, going.. wait what where'd it go?

For those in the forum over on the Raspberry Pi site, this is one of the Admins Abishur

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, these are strictly my views about the launch and should not be viewed as a reflection the opinions of said foundation.

Today the Raspberry Pi, a $25 credit card sized, low powered PC announced that they had two resellers that were officially accepting pre-orders… except that one of them wasn’t? And the other one went down for “scheduled site maintenance” shortly after the Raspberry Pi Foundation made its announcement. So what on earth happened?

The Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF) decided a long time ago that the fairest way sell the boards were on a first come first serve basis. There have been a lot of people claiming that this was an idiotic way to sell a product, as an individual who did not get one of the boards I disagree with this assessment. First come first serve is how it works for Microsoft, for Apple, for Sony, and for Nintendo. It’s how it works every time you walk into a grocery store or department store or even every time you drive up to a gas station.

One alternative suggested, that I know of, has been to do a lotto where members were chosen at random to be able to buy a board. This has *several* glaring issues.

                 1)   You’re no more likely to get a board with a lotto than first come, so everyone would still be complaining (let’s face it, the biggest whiners are not whining because they truly believe this to be unfair, but they didn’t get one)

                 2)  Which list of people do you use? Twitter subscribers, forum members, mailing list subscribers? In any of those cases it’s highly probable that there are people who have joined it multiple times with different e-mail addresses; as such they would get a double (or triple!) chance of winning making the lotto unfair.

So the RPF worked all the details out with Premier Farnell and RS Components two rather hefty UK electronics site. Here’s where the failure happened, despite ample warning and planning on the RPF’s end, for some reason the sites just plain ignored the warning. I can’t stress how much I think the RPF did everything they needed to in order to facilitate a smooth launch. They created a very simple static front page with all the information we’d need, they gave the suppliers a good warning, they were up and ready to answer questions via twitter (keeping the strain off their servers in order to make sure everyone got a fair chance to see the announcement without crashing their server).

Where things did break down is that neither Farnell nor RS took the appropriate steps to handle things. They should have given the RPF a link taking customers straight to the Raspberry Pi (R-pi on the forum) product page and made sure that page was cached to reduce strain on their server. They didn’t and as a result their sites crashed under the traffic (Farnell tried to disguise it as a "scheduled site maintenance but we know the score now, don't we?).

They should have made it very clear on how to order from a different country. I live in the US and spent quite a bit of time between time out errors of their site crashing trying to figure out which version of their site I needed to order it from. I actually set up an account on RS’ site only to realize post ex facto that I was on a UK only version of the site. I’m told that they’ll contact us in order that we expressed interest on their site (that might be my misunderstanding something though), if that’s the case and I’m one of the lucky first ones, will I be able to get it shipped to the US or will I lose my spot in line so to speak?

Making matters worse for some reason RS had the bright idea to not start accepting pre-orders today. They decided that they would just see how many people were interested in it and start selling it “later this week” RS *should* have told the RPF about this, well I guess the truth is that RS *should* have actually taken pre-orders like they told the RPF they were going to. Instead we’re all walking around on pin and needles wondering when they’ll start accepting pre-orders on the stoke they’re about to get.

Now I stayed up late last night fully expecting to not get an R-pi. I figured midnight would hit, I’d run to the store, click on the link and while setting up an account have them sell out. I was okay and prepared for that. I was, however, not expecting to spend 2 hours trying to make it to either site only to discover that they were both sold out and based on the number of pre-orders, expecting it to be April before I could expect my Pi.

Poor RPF, y’all have my complete sympathy in all this! Y’all have done nothing but act with intelligent business sense, how horrible to have that screwed up by distributers who frankly I’ve come to expect much more out of! Still, I, like so many other out there, am placing my bets on still being able to nab one of the boards from RS’ initial stock! *sigh* oh well, I’ve waited 9 months for the thing already that’s nothing compared to the 6 years the RPF has been working on this!

Hope you guys (Liz, Eben, David, Gert, James, Jack, et el) are enjoy a well deserved break after all this fiasco! Y’all have been really quite brilliant through all of it!

Going once, going twice, going.. wait what where'd it go?