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Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

Amerteurish would be to blindly carry on launching a product and then releaseing version 2.0 that fixed all the issues and making the 1.0 unsuported.

No, what google did was to listern to feedback and respond in the best possible way. Those who ordered get the product and there money back and those who havnt get a chance to wait for the improved version based upon feedback. Realy can't fault that and to call it amateurish is perhaps overly strong. No power plays at work at all, mearly good PR/marketing and activly listerning to feedback.

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They may have made the best of a bad situation, but getting into this situation is still amateurish.

I'm all for listening to feedback. But there are ways of getting feedback on a product without doing a major product launch. Like, say, making 50 prototypes and trying them out on Google employees and external user testers. There's no way these problems wouldn't have surfaced in user tests. I suspect all the major issues would have shown up with just 5-10 testers.

The question is: why didn't they do that? Plenty of people know how. Since I can't believe that all their executives, designers, and engineers are that clueless/arrogant, I think it's reasonable to suspect that the problem is one clueless executive exerting power.

Amerteurish would be to blindly carry on launching a product and then releaseing version 2.0 that fixed all the issues and making the 1.0 unsuported.

Sounds like Google TV...

Google TV's lack of success has certainly taught them a lesson or two here. Hence, the freebies as an attempt to win back good will.

The lesson they need to learn is don't do things that lose goodwill in the first place.

Listening to feedback is great but I literally don't know anyone who didn't look at it and immediately go "nice but $300?"

There have to be questions about how no-one worked out at least some of the larger issues before it got anywhere near launch.

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