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Arrington's CrunchPad Dies
adeelarshad82 writes "Michael Arrington announced the death of the CrunchPad on Monday morning in a blog post heavily spiced with angst and drama. According to Arrington, the Crunchpad, a 12-inch Web tablet expected to be priced at about $300, was just days away from launch. At the last minute, however, Arrington received an email from Chandra Rathakrishnan, the chief executive of manufacturing partner Fusion Garage, apparently trying to cut Arrington out of the product on the eve of the launch. Fusion Garage, according to Arrington, wanted to market the device itself under its own name; which obviously was the deal breaker. Arrington claims that the company had overcome obstacles at every stage in the business such as deals with Intel, retail launch, securing venture capital and angel investments. Interesting bit is that some were already speculating that the Crunchpad was not real."
But here's to hoping it relaunches with an ARM processor running Chrome OS! This seems like the perfect application for it, really.
It wouldn't be a surprise if the whole thing was just a hoax. Like the other article says:
Arrington, who is not a journalist (and has never professed to be one), regularly talks to financial guys, with close ties to virtually every major technology company. He's also plugged into these same companies at even higher levels. Oh, and he also invests in companies he writes about. At times, this can make his information incredibly prescient and also highly self-serving. The problem is, no one can tell the difference.
And a few days before launch and dies for such a stupid reason? Please.
We still acknowledge that Arrington and TechCrunch bring some value to your business endeavorIf he agrees to our terms, we would have Arrington assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head and Fusion Garage would acquire the rights to use the Crunchpad brand and name. Personally, I don’t think the name is all that important but you seem to be somewhat attached to the name.
Translation:
I'd like to cash in on Arrington's hard work. Does he have some sort of puppeteer's slot in his ass or lower back where we could shove our arm during launches? Or is he run by remote control? Does he come with instructions or ... how does this 'Arrington thing' work exactly? Please toss him the offer of looking like Steve Jobs in the eyes of the public but being my subservient bitch behind the curtains and being forever financially crippled. If he requests vasaline, we may be able to find some funding somewhere but we're not making any promises. There are sharks and there are sheep ...
Honestly, I applaud Arrington's levelheaded response. I believe mine would have consisted of nothing more than "WTF?" and an image.
Aside from all that, I'm sad because I really was excited to see what came out of this and would have been interested after the price dropped a bit. I mean, depending on battery life, you'd have to be nuts to get a Kindle over this.
My work here is dung.
I would have been a customer for this device, but after this I will not now or ever buy anything under the Fusion Garage brand.
On the other hand, let's see what Fusion Garage ships. Might be ok. Too bad Arrington gets cut out of the deal. You'd think a lawyer would have better smarts about these things.
Oh, wait....
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The Kindle is actually $260 now, and it has an non-backlit eInk screen with a three-week battery-life. It has always-on, free 3G internet access, and it has accesses to the gigantic Amazon digital book store.
This thing might have been a cool (concept for a) gadget, but it is certainly not a replacement for the Kindle. The Kindle is aimed at (and is perfect for) people who like to read BOOKS.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Unless they rework everything that touches the co-owned intellectual property, there is no way Fusion Garage can legally ship anything. Arrington said as much and stated that a lawsuit would be waiting for Fusion Garage should they attempt to ship anything without CrunchPad's approval.
This whole thread has been modded Troll. I'm guessing the CEO of Fusion Garage somehow got mod points.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Meh. I'm holding out for a Nook. More open, more features, same price.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I'm not sure what Arrington is bringing to the party here. He's not an engineer that I know of, but more of a money guy. It seems like Fusion Garage was doing all of the heavy lifting on the project. It's not clear how much skin Arrington had in the game. If he was providing serious development capital, he has a point. If all he was providing was "vision" and bloviation and hype via his blog, with maybe a seriously minority share of the capital, then he should STFU. There must be some sort of written contract for a venture like this. Let's see what it says.
Personally, I don't feel that the branding of something with "Arrington", "Tech Crunch", or "Crunchpad" brings a lot to the table.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Airing your dirty laundry on your blog is a sure-fire way to alienate the very people with which you want to reach an agreement. You've no doubt made it harder to resolve your differences amicably, even if Fusion Garage were the ones being dicks.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
This is pretty run-of-the-mill back stabbing in OEM/ODM business.
1. The manufacturer sees an opportunity with a weak 'partner'
2. Screws the partner.
3. Profit!
The thing is 'Fusion Garage' would have screwed him even if they worked a geographic restrictions deal out. If there was any meaningful market acceptance, any number of bigger OEM's would have taken their lunch in ~24 months.
Sad it has to go like this, but this very common unless you are an HP/Apple/Dell. Typical chicken-egg capitalism problem.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Meh. I'm holding out for a Nook. More open, more features, same price.
My wife's is supposed to ship today. She placed her order within an hour of announcement and hopefully won't get hit by the 2010 bump.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
To be fair, it sounds like the technological side of the job was fairly simple. Knock together some commodity parts, put on a coat of polish, all set.
The "dealing with everybody's least favorite social primate" part, on the other hand...
I don't think you read the article because it addressed that very point. They were days away from a public announcement and they had some units ready to go for the press and then this shit gets pulled on him.
The only reason anyone is talking about this is because of Arrington's relentless zeal for self-promotion. I never thought this thing was going to happen, and in regard to keeping Arrington's name in circulation, it was a smashing success. The only thing missing from this soap opera is that Google/Microsoft/Apple diabolically combined with SMERSH to stop the CrunchPud before it could lead to world peace.
I got notification from UPS a bit earlier today that they had a package for me. Since the only package I'm waiting on at the moment is a Nook, I think your wife will be getting hers. (I ordered a few days after the announcement.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
It went hours without crashing.
...Good selling point.
Translation: I'd like to cash in on Arrington's hard work.
I have no reason to doubt that Arrington is being screwed here, and that he does in fact have intellectual property rights that are being trampled on, but how much hard work did he actually do on this thing? My understanding is that he mostly said, "I want this thing with these specs at this price, make it happen" and his manufacturing partner is the one that actually built it.
Arrington is providing (a) his services as a sort of ideal end-user (i.e. if this one tech-savvy guy really, really wants a thing that works exactly like this, there's probably a market for it) and (b) a ready-made market in the shape of his extensive and influential (in tech circles) audience. The latter indeed took hard work to amass, but he's not the one who actually built the CrunchPad.
ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS have a shot-gun clause with a hard time limit in any significant partnership agreement. This "co-owned" 50/50 split stuff is BS and is way too likely to go sour.
If they had a shot-gun clause in their agreement, this would be a simple matter of one party or the other buying full rights and continuing on with the project, no legal system and multi-year drawn out court battles designed to put all the money in lawyers pockets. The issue would be resolved in a matter of days and both parties would essentially be happy.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
He lampoons startups every day and finally tries something on his own and realizes it's harder said than done, what a surprise. This guy is a dick and always has been; it's kinda nice to hear he's having trouble!
Meh, just seems like classic moneygrubbing stupidity.
"We want more money from this otherwise you can't have it!" is a rallying cry too often seen in the world of music rights to TV show DVD releases. I mean, take WKRP. Instead of cutting a deal, the rates to relicence the music remained too high to include the original track. So the rightsholders end up losing money, the customers get a subpar product, and no one really wins.
Take the money and run; keep trying to win against the banker will just get you the suitcase with $1 when you should've settled for the $17,000 offer.
...but how much hard work did he actually do on this thing?
Doesn't matter. The post clearly shows (if accurate) that Arrington owns a piece of the intellectual property that make up the CrunchPad. Its as if a bunch of different people got together to make a pizza chain with one guy coming up with the name, logo, mascot, and business plan, and the other guys deciding to ace that first guy out yet retaining all of that first guy's input. Its a blatant rip-off of Arrington, no matter how much work he did. If you own a piece, you own a piece. That fact isn't up for debate. I bet you'd be pissed off too if this happened to you; even if you spent all the development time sitting on your couch channel surfing.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Leo LaPorte is laughing his ass off and noting that Karma is a bitch.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I have no reason to doubt that Arrington is being screwed here, and that he does in fact have intellectual property rights that are being trampled on, but how much hard work did he actually do on this thing? My understanding is that he mostly said, "I want this thing with these specs at this price, make it happen" and his manufacturing partner is the one that actually built it.
Well, to Arrignton's credit he (or the TechCrunch side of things) did build the first prototype. He also provided office space for Fusion Garage and no doubt was integral in the testing. There's also a lot of talk about setting up distribution and funding although it's hard to say how much of that was Arringtons doing. Overall I would say Arrington has contributed at least an equal share into the project.
Doesn't matter. The post clearly shows (if accurate) that Arrington owns a piece of the intellectual property that make up the CrunchPad.
So, patents are *good* today? It's tough to keep track...
Seriously, Arrington clearly bit off *far* more than he could chew. Any jackass can "invent" a tablet. "10 inch screen, wireless, touch input, long battery life, less than $300!" How hard is that? The hard part is actually designing, manufacturing, and bringing the product to market. Those things are *very* difficult. That's why all those great ideas everyone comes up with never happen.
Arrington's posts about the CrunchPad were *always* exaggerated and idealistic in tone. These are good signs that he was deluded and had a fantasy of grandeur. This was compounded by the slashdot-types who would *love* a CrunchPad.
Arrington clearly had the desire, the drive and the imagination, and even that's a lot. After all, he got a lot further than any of us would have. But he clearly didn't have what it takes to make the product real. If the product *really* was just "days away" from production, and if he *really* has done all the work people are attributing to him, he could just take his project to someone else. But he can't, because he really *didn't* do as much as he thought, and he really *wasn't* just days away from production.
Too bad, too. Because the CrunchPad sure did *sound* like a great *idea*.
mobi is a proprietary format (it is owned by a company, and they control the format), and Kindle's version isn't straight mobi, it's a slight modification. Txt and pdf aren't ebook formats. (They are text and e-paper formats, respectively. Yes, there is a difference.) And the Nook can use those as well.
epub is a true open format: available to any without licensing fees and such. Software is available freely to convert books and other text into it, and out of it should you so choose. (Provided they haven't been encrypted using the DRM provision, of course.)
And it's the Kindle that has the more limited selection: Epub is the more common format, and the Nook also supports the older (proprietary) eReader format, that has been used for around 10 years, starting on the Palm platform.
I fully expect to be able to read 70-90% of my current library of ebooks without conversion on my Nook. I'd have to convert 100%, using Amazon's service, on the Kindle.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
You're a moron. The article doesn't say that it ran "up to an hour before crashing", it said "it ran for several hours without crashing" which he said was good enough for demos. Fair enough. I don't know where the Hell you got the part about having two hand-built versions of the thing and there's nothing like that in the article. As regards the time machine... The possibility that he is narrating events that happened a couple of weeks ago rather than today seems to be beyond your comprehension. The official launch was set for the 20th. The fatal email came through a few days before that. Wisely, Arrington did not post the story until he'd pursued things privately first, hence the news breaks today. Wow - did you fail to comprehend the article!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I'm not sure if your confusion stems from the fact that this is to complicated for you to understand, or that you don't want to understand.
First, the Kindle supports mobi. Regular, non-DRM mobi format. Your claim otherwise is factually, indisputably false.
Secondly, it's the number of books supported that matters. If a book is only available in a format the Nook can't read but the Kindle can, the fact that the Nook supports your favorite format doesn't count for shit.
So in conclusion: both the Kindle and the Nook support open ebook formats. The Kindle also supports the format used by the Amazon store; the nook does not. If the number of books available from the Amazon store is much larger than those available for the Nook, that's a serious advantage for the Kindle as an ebook reader.
Good luck to B&N. I hope they get full publisher support eventually. Without it, the Nook will be a 2nd-class citizen of the ebook world.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Bezos says he's selling them, but he hasn't released any sales figures.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's true; his wife is getting my package right now.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The CrunchPad was supposed to have open hardware & software, right?
It was almost finished and ready for release, right?
So where's the hardware design & source code? Or was all that "open" talk just BS meant to get support from the slashcrunch crowd?
The culture in most B-Schools is really kind of interesting and disgusting. My office is directly adjacent to my institution's business school and I'll sometimes have lunch in their cafeteria, because the food is decent. I suppose that when you're charging a quarter of a million for a degree you are somewhat required to provide edible food. It's hard not to notice that nearly every single student or faculty member there is a tool. I only wish I was making a generality.
Take the ugliest tendencies of a jock fraternity, add greed, avarice, hair-gel, flop-sweat and downright meanness.
Ever see the movie Glengarry Glen Ross? Think of the Alec Baldwin character. Now take away the charm and intelligence and give him the patina of higher education and the aroma of Axe body spray. That's the population of a business school.
I sometimes play in a floating poker game for academics. The only person we've ever had to physically put out was from the B-School. And get this: it was a asst prof from Romance Languages that executed the bum's rush. The ejectee went on to create a retail start-up that made some money, grew fast and went down hard. I've heard that some working stiffs got hurt in the deal, but the major players went on to give "make money at home" seminars and host an infomercial on local AM radio (the kind that try to sound like a real radio talk show). And this is a guy from one of the top-ten US biz schools.
By comparison, the folks over at the law school are sweethearts.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Arrington pulled a SourceForge.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-web-tablet-help-us-build-it/
He declared a project, didn't put much in beyond the idea for the project, and then expected people to flock to the project and build it for him. Very much the same way people declare projects on SourceForge, and then expect volunteer programmers to come out of the woodwork and build whatever their pet project happens to be.
The only difference here is that it involved both hardware and software, and not just software.
I went to the Internet WayBack Machine and read all of the blogs from Fusion Garage (the actual site is currently down, probably intentionally), and it looks like all of the software was done by them, including the OS, and it looks (from Arrington's blogs) like a lot of the hardware was done by Intel.
I don't mean to discount the value of vision or publicity, but really, he intended to Open Source everything about the tablet when he declared the project, and I don't really see a lot of value being taken from him in that case, since he wouldn't be building hardware anyway. The only money would be in margin on the hardware if the software was all out there. A lot of people have posted similar specifications for what they'd like to see in a tablet computer, and the only difference between them and Arrington is Arrington has a lot of self-publicity and got a startup to bite on the bait to actually build the thing.
Arrington might have some arguments with regard to industrial design, but the prototype hardware was not built by him, and the software that made that hardware live and breathe was definitely not his.
I've worked at combo hardware/software startups, and I've worked at software-only startups (including my own), and universally, the hardware in the hardware/software startups was all about minimal COGS and industrial design (being at Apple now, that's pretty much all there is). The value-add over commodity hardware is that it isn't "cheapest vendor of the part of the day" (so the hardware is reliable and not crap because of constantly retooled assembly lines), and it's the software. When Apple builds a laptop, it doesn't build hardware, and it doesn't build software, it builds systems. The people who don't get that and churn out 1.5%-4% margin crap do so at their peril.
My reading of things is that Arrington is no Jonathan Ive, and he's no Steve Jobs when it comes to design of hardware or software.
Fusion Garage may have taken his idea and run with it.. and they want to cut him in on profits from something, the intrinsic value of which he intended to give away for no profit, but they don't seem to be ripping him off to do it, although they do seem to be leveraging as much as they can to get him to accept a minority role with regard to what he brings to the table (which, per the above, by my reckoning, isn't much; sorry, Arrington).
As more than one V.C. has told me in the past, the point is not the idea; there are millions of good ideas that go unfunded all the time (I'll point at SourceForge again, where "funding" equates to "provision of manpower necessary to complete a project"); what a V.C. funds is the ability to execute on a vision, no matter whose vision it is, and the team behind that ability to execute on the vision and bring a product to market. 1 in 10 entrepreneurs get funded; 1 in 10 of those fail in the first year. That's only a 1 in 100 chance of being around after a year.
Arrington's failure is no less spectacular than anyone else's in that 99 out of 100 failures, he's just made it more public by ranting about it.
Ironically, the idea may still not be a failure, merely a failure on his part to control the thing which was built on his (and a lot of other peoples similar) idea, if Fusion Garage or someone else simply continues on and executes on it.
Good luck in your future endeavors, but don't think that by declaring an idea publically that you've built or created anything.
-- Terry
Many years ago ('95) when my then startup company was living hand to mouth we were approached by a rather slick character who had Big Plans - he was talking to lots of hardware and infrastructure providers about this huge project and he wanted us to to the software component - because we were Java specialists (not exactly very common back then). We had a lot of meetings - some with major 3-letter hardware vendors and we got rather excited about the whole thing. Turns out he was a dick collecting information for his MBA project - which of course he managed to forgot to mention to anyone. The hardware and telco guys were really quite upset and they were way more experienced than us (not to mention that they actually wore suits to the meetings). Subsequent experience with "really bright" people with MBAs from "top schools" has reinforced a view in me that is entirely consistent with your comment about them generally being a bunch of tools.