Originally Posted by
DNicolasL That's not a perfect system. I'm buying one for my girlfriend, and my dad is buying one (he's leaving Sprint). We have separate Google accounts. Imagine what the system would do under your scenario. There's only one real way to do it right: have a ton of inventory ready.
Agreed. And, of course, the problem has been that nexus has, until recently, been a niche product. Even Apple, who is very used to having a product with high initial demand, has shortages at the beginning of each launch, long lines of people at the stores, people trading large amounts of money or even organs for them, etc.
Google was building out the Nexus 4 long before the N7 shortages, and is a small-scale customer of LG. And the N7 launch could have been a fluke. 7 inch high-spec tablets for two hundred clams were revolutionary. So ordering increases in manufacturing and risking excess inventory of a product with razor-thin margins, even if it was possible, is not entirely advisable.
Judge Google for what they knew before launch... A release of the latest in a long line of niche product, salivated over by a small community of enthusiasts as usual, ignored by most pundits because it lacks LTE and other features any marketer would consider necessary for mobile phone success in 2012.
Had Google responded and stopped the release to build out sufficient inventory, no one would have one right now, and they wouldn't have the first batch in people's hands getting the feedback they need to detect manufacturing defects that can only really be seen in a large scale (eg. The screen lift on my Nexus 7). And we'd all be clamoring about the massive fail of the delayed launch.
Launching a high demand product with plenty of experience and warning is quite hard. Launching one you didn't think would be high demand is harder. Launching a high demand product you didn't know would be high demand and having no prior experience with high demand product? I'm amazed product is shipping.
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