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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."
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.
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.
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
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!
What's up with all the Chrome on ARM astroturfing around here...? It's quite obvious, guys.
For some reason, the link where Fusion Garage gives their side of the story is missing in my browser. Can you provide me with it?
For some reason, the clause in the Slashdot TOS that requires me to hear both sides of an argument before rendering my personal opinion is missing in my browser. Can you provide me with it?
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