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Filed under: Business •

Building Good Hardware (is Harder Than it Looks)

Building good hardware is not a trivial undertaking. We’ve all seen it time and time again as new companies go through the throes of taking a great concept all the way through the many layers of design and development, to a final shipping product (unfortunately, not always in quantity). We saw this play out for Red Digital Cinema, with their months of revised shipping target dates and hardware changes. Sony dealt with it when they had to fix widespread lens issues shortly after the EX1 launch. Even the mighty Apple has faltered recently with the somewhat buggy launch of the iPhone 3G revision. I’ll say it again; building good hardware is not an easy task. Even while companies miss the mark, what’s is interesting to me is that rarely is the original idea a bad one. In this article I’d like to take a look at several recent product launches from “indie-centric” companies. I’ll also discuss the reservations and deposits business model, a practice that seems to be largely constrained to these small businesses. I’ll sometimes casually refer to this as the “Red-servations” model of business. Obviously the concept of taking reservations in advance wasn’t innovated by Red Digital Cinema, but they really put it on the map with the development of the Red One camera. Read on…

I should start by saying that when these small indie companies get it right, the final shipping product is often a work of art and artful engineering. In most cases these products fill a niche that previously had no affordable solution. But often the time to bring that product to market is months (or years). And this long development cycle seems to be exacerbated by the current trend of taking reservations well in advance, and moreso by hyping a product that doesn’t yet exist outside of the design phase.

Let’s take a few moments and consider Redrock Micro’s launch of the microMattebox product. I’ve chosen Redrock as an example not to pick on them, but because the finished product in question is a fantastic one, and arguably worth the wait. Nevertheless, let’s deconstruct the development cycle of the microMattebox. The product was initially announced prior to NAB 2007, in fact FreshDV had one of the first interviews with Redrock’s Brian Valente on the topic. At the NAB expo a few months later Redrock showed off a rapid-prototype’d plastic mockup. The design was compelling, and the projected price point and specs sounded great. Later in the fall of that year, the company announced that they would be taking reservations and that those on the list would get the shipping product in a first-come-first served model. As you can imagine, this created quite a buzz in the online community. In November of 2007, Redrock announced that shipments of the mattebox to reservation holders were “targeted for delivery in late December” (of 2007), with general order shipments to be available “in the January/February timeframe.” At this time they also required a small deposit to retain a place in the reservations list. Geeks everywhere wet their collective pants and giggled like schoolgirls (well I did anyway).

Cut to months later at NAB 2008, and Redrock showed off what appeared to be the final version of the mattebox, stating that reservation orders would begin shipping immediately, and general orders within 60 days. Following NAB 2008, Redrock took the advice and feedback from a few beta testers and decided to re-engineer a few key facets of the design, resulting in an excellent final shipping product (at a brilliant price point). All this time, there were very few official announcements and updates provided. Near as I can figure, matteboxes did not begin shipping in quantity to reservation holders until sometime in July, and non-reservation orders didn’t begin shipping until after August 8 (this date per a Redrock announcement). That “general availability” date is nearly a year after the reservations were first opened, and a good 18 months from the initial product announcement. You can imagine the frustration that some users have vented at this long development cycle, particularly since so many deadlines were slipped in the process. The good news is that Redrock appears to have brought a brilliant product to market. While FreshDV has not tested the unit to date, most of the user reports we are hearing are very positive. Even with a protracted development schedule, it appears that Redrock Micro listened to the needs of the community, and delivered an affordable and feature-rich solution to filmmakers.

So why my beef with lead times and long-term reservations? Read on and I’ll explain…

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