Originally Posted by
limdoug From a customer facing stand point, Google messed this up. They should have gone with a pre-order system so that people who got their orders through wouldn't have assumed they were actually going to get the phone shipped on the 15th like the order status told us.
From a forecasting stand point, 3 weeks is actually amazingly short. If you think about it, how would you have forecasted the demand for this product? It's not like they would be able to take a poll and ask how many people are going to buy this thing. For the US market, I guess I would have broken this thing into chunks of demand.
1) Demand generated from people who were done with their contracts and looking to upgrade. They could have looked at all the people who have gone into the play store with their android phones and then counted forward two years from their first use. All the people who are 2 year eligible would in theory be able to purchase this phone. Of course not all the people who are eligible would buy the phone and some people would willingly break their contracts so that introduces some more variability into your demand right there.
2) Demand generated from people who have never had Android and want to get into the ecosystem. I'd guess they'd need to look at market data and see how many smart phone users there are and how many aren't on Android. They'd need market research data to see what type of turn ratios they see in the typical population. Again, not exact science here.
3) Demand generated from people who have never had a smartphone. They'll need market research data here too.
Those are just three high level chunks that came into my head with a ton of variability in each one. I think to be off on their forecast just by three weeks is actually quite amazing. They probably had hedged with parts suppliers to keep greater safety stock just in case something like this happened. That right there is probably the difference between us getting the phones in 3 weeks vs 3 months.
I'm not really mad at them for the delay, more like pouting like a little kid because I can't get my shiny toy right now, but I at least understand that it's hard to make the right amount of product at the right time. Some of you may argue that they should have just made a billion of these things. Google may not have problems with market cap or working capital, but all the parts suppliers that feed into LG may. We don't have their P&Ls to look at. Another potential issue is somewhere along the line, there was a capacity constraint. Maybe it was the screen, or the screws, or the board, or the flash memory...we just don't have any idea from where we sit. It's easy to sit at our computers and yell, but in a real world supply chain, it's hard to get right. That's one thing that Apple has down that Google may never get to.
Just a rant while I'm waiting out my three weeks...
Yeah, cause you know, there definitely wasn't a signup option available on their page where they could gauge by the number of subscribers.
Google, the company that offers analytics, can't estimate the demand for a product?
People need to stop cutting Google slack on this one. There is simply no way a company of its caliber should have royally effed this launch up. No excuses, nothing.
ordered mine 11:35am EST on 11/13 and still waiting on email of either shipping or delay. I'm in Northeast, NJ.Ordered mine @ 11:46 EST
...bumper is cheap! lol
