What a tremendous failure. Why check with your distributors before going live? It's not even the traffic; RS never sold any and for the rare moment that you could get to Farnell, they were already (or always have been) out of stock from minute one.
Apparently the only way you could actually get one is through some back of the woods partner site of them in Australia. Hooray.
The $AUD is worth more than the $US, but tech goods always cost more in Australia than they should.
Weirdly that link lists prices for more than one board; RaspberryPI made it very clear that the initial batch was "one per customer".
I would rather they had a small initial run first, that didn't take so long to get to market, and allowed them to test the waters tentatively. The alternative would have been to take a much larger risk, longer lead time, and bigger upfront cost to make a bigger batch.
We're always advocating that companies should ship small and early and then iterate to refine their product. This is a MVP from them. If I was involved I would be extremely proud and overjoyed at this.
all the complainers should take a step back and relax. What's the worst that has happened because you couldn't get you hands on this just yet? It's not as though you have lost money, missed deadlines, or anything else. Just give the consumerism a rest for a while.
As for RS Components' and Farnell's reputation as businesses...
PS. I did get up at 6am to try and order a board, but wasn't too disappointed when I couldn't get on the RS website. I can wait another month or so.
I'd imagine traffic to their website on a normal day is relatively low. Even though they're worldwide companies, their market is pretty niche.