http://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/05/21/butterfly-labs-bitcoin-kerfuffle-is-classic-startup-mistake/"Butterfly Labs has been plagued with mounting concern from disgruntled customers, which led to company reps delivering harsh rebuttals including Josh Zerlan’s, the company spokesperson, statement on its forum which read “You received no answer because your question was so incredibly stupid that it doesn’t deserve an answer.”
Joining Kristin Feledy in this morning’s NewsDesk is SiliconANGLE Founding Editor Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, providing his Breaking Analysis on Butterfly Labs’ ASIC Bitcoin mining gears and the harsh statements directed at customers who wanted some answers.
Is there’s more to the delay than just production issues? Are the mining gears really shipping?
According to Hopkins, the gears are really shipping and he personally knows people who have received their gears. As far as the outbursts go, it’s not something that happened because of other unknown issues that customers need to worry over. Hopkins explains that “customer service is not in the repertoire of the Butterfly Labs folks, which is geeks and engineers.” These geeky skills and “social graces don’t usually go hand-in-hand,” says Hopkins.
He also noted that the Butterfly Labs kerfuffle is a classic mistake done by startup entrepreneurs: over-promising and under delivering. You cannot blame customers for reacting harshly regarding the delays, especially when they’ve already paid for the gear. Unfortunately, as stated earlier, Butterfly Labs’ people weren’t well-prepared to handle disgruntled customers."
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https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2277148"Describing BFL's pyramid scam as a "kerfuffle" is itself a "kerfuffle". The notion that they're just incompetent, but well meaning or trustworthy is SO last year. What was that 2012 drop dead date for chip delivery again?
The article linked above also dismisses BFL reps' lack of social graces as a by-product of their nerdiness and tech savvy nature, yet it's been proven again and again that their Chief Operating Officer knows next to nothing about chip production, product design, chip cooling, power consumption, or a multitude of other elements essential to the production of a product as technically challenging as an ASIC mining device. This is why BFL has outsourced nearly everything, supposedly to people that DO know this stuff. So what is it that BFL people do all day again? ...and why can't they treat investors with the respect they deserve?"