This has bothered me from the start. I was not one of the buyers, so I have a different take on the issue. From all his writings, you get a sense that Cringely was a big-idea man, but he had very little ability to follow through on his next great idea or venture. It seems like he would lose interest once the hard part of building a business started to appear. In this case, it looks like someone revved him up on the idea of selling a low-cost Mineserver, I think it was his son, but he probably mispriced the true cost and did not calculate the amount of work it would take to get the project finished. I don't think he started out with the idea of not delivering the product. He was just not capable of following through on his grand ideas. Some people are dreamers, and others are doers. He was a dreamer, and you could sense it in all of his writings.
That's the thing with Kickstarter you never really know if you will ever get the product. This project just became one of the many Kickstarter projects that failed.
This has bothered me from the start. I was not one of the buyers, so I have a different take on the issue. From all his writings, you get a sense that Cringely was a big-idea man, but he had very little ability to follow through on his next great idea or venture. It seems like he would lose interest once the hard part of building a business started to appear. In this case, it looks like someone revved him up on the idea of selling a low-cost Mineserver, I think it was his son, but he probably mispriced the true cost and did not calculate the amount of work it would take to get the project finished. I don't think he started out with the idea of not delivering the product. He was just not capable of following through on his grand ideas. Some people are dreamers, and others are doers. He was a dreamer, and you could sense it in all of his writings.
That's the thing with Kickstarter you never really know if you will ever get the product. This project just became one of the many Kickstarter projects that failed.