Razer will not cancel 90%-off test coupons
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I'm a huge fan of Razer. I own many of their products and would recommend them all, especially the DeathAdder mouse. Seriously, it's quite possibly the best mouse you will ever use.
I didn't get anything ordered with a 90% reduction, but I think I'll be ordered an Orbweaver later today. They deserve it.
1: http://www.digital-forums.com/showthread.php/307773-Misprice...
edit: Spelling, and added the only source I could find.
What mousemat are you using? I was using a Razer Goliathus[1] but switched to a BF3 Razer Scarab[2] my brother won at in an internal DICE raffle before BF3 came out. It is 100x better than the Goliathus and I would recommend a similar 'hard' mat if you don't have one already. Lots of space, very smooth, and very accurate.
1: http://www.razerzone.com/gb-en/store/razer-goliathus-speed-e... 2: http://www.razerzone.com/gb-en/store/battlefield-3-razer-sca...
I am not saying Razer only does this because they see their benefit, but they probably also dont only do it because they are nice people.
The configuration tool was designed in the vein of Steam — it requires an Internet connection to use it. At all. So before you can change the mouse settings, before the mouse will even LOAD its settings, you must create a Razer account and sign in to their online service through the tool. Only then will you be able to do anything with the mouse.
Also like Steam, there is an option to 'go offline', but it (perhaps unintentionally) doesn't seem to persist across sessions. So if you lose your connection and then you reboot the computer or the tool crashes (which is semi-frequent), you're back to where you started — a log-in prompt.
In addition to that, just from a usability perspective, the software is a disaster. It is a mass of grey-on-grey text, modal panes, near-full-screen sliders, and unexplained icons that i dread even thinking about using. In addition, the tool adds an ugly menu-bar icon that you can't get rid of, and once you install the software you can never close it — if you try to kill the tool or any of its background services, the entire thing will respawn. And just to give you that extra punch in the face, every time the tool starts (at boot or because one of its background services crashed) the giant black-and-green blob pops up on top of everything else. HEY, HEY, LOG IN TO YOUR MOUSE NOW
The scroll wheel is also apparently non-configurable on OS X, which is incredible because the default behaviour is some pre-Windows-95 we've-just-invented-scroll-wheels one-pixel-per-rotation insanity.
Lastly, every single update to the software requires that you reboot the entire machine.
I am not exaggerating when i say that i loathe using this god-damn mouse.
I only used the software once, a few years ago. I never logged into anything, it never required internet access, it never frequently updated and it never required a reboot.
You realise you don't need the software right? You can use the mouse perfectly without it. All the software lets you do is change the sensitivity (any good OS will let you do that), turn off the light, and program the "bottom" button. The light is under your hand 90% of the time and is off when your computer is off. It's a non-issue. The button the bottom is in an irritating position and I have never needed to use it. Sure, you could configure it to change sensitivity during a game (consider running and gunning vs. accurate sniping, perhaps?) but in reality no one is going to lift their mouse during an computer game to adjust the sensitivity.
> the default behaviour is some pre-Windows-95 we've-just-invented-scroll-wheels one-pixel-per-rotation insanity.
I have never experienced this problem. I don't know what you're talking about.
Except if you have a mouse like the Naga with more programmable buttons, they're all useless unless you use the software.
It works great on my MX518 so I don't have to use the terrible Logitech software to configure the extra buttons. :)
Regardless, I'm using the old, pre-Synapse drivers and they work ok.
They changed the software package literally less than a week after i bought the DeathAdder. Previously there was a specific 'DeathAdder' utility which, as you said, didn't require any online junk. But they completely removed it from existence once their port of the Windows software left beta or whatever.
I did try installing a copy of it that i had saved from before, but it seems that the act of installing the new software somehow broke the ability to use the old one, and i didn't want to spend hours fucking with some mouse driver.
> You realise you don't need the software right? You can use the mouse perfectly without it.
No, you can't. Or i can't, anyway. The default tracking is unusable to me (i like it much slower and smoother-scaling than most people seem to), and OS X's tracking slider didn't help. The only way to make it even tolerable was to use the software. Additionally, the buttons would be recognised incorrectly unless you told the software what you wanted them to behave as.
> I have never experienced this problem. I don't know what you're talking about.
Obviously i was being facetious, i'm sure it was actually one line per 'click' or whatever. Each click had far too much travel for that to be usable. Especially in comparison to the Magic Mouse and Mighty Mouse, with which you can near-instantaneously flick to the bottom of a long Web page.
If you didn't experience that, i guess i don't know what to tell you.
At least through 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8, and maybe going back longer than that, I've been using ControllerMate to program the functionality of all my mice (and some of my non-Apple keyboards). It's more of a general purpose visual programmer for input devices than a mouse driver, but works great for that limited use case.
It's a great help for the common case with mice of great hardware coupled with terrible software. I haven't installed third-party mouse software since I found it. Might be worth checking out. (Not affiliated, just find it useful...)
Most of the time installing mouse "drivers" for any vendor it's a waste of time, since the settings they provide should be adjusted in-game (default driver should give you a 1:1 sensitivity and 0 acceleration).
This 'mishap' may have similar yet increased effects because of the impressive way they handled the situation. For example, I doubt Razer would have ever imagined their story landing on the frontpage of a high-traffic site like HN, but now that it has, I (and probably hundreds or thousands of others) have gone to their site to get more info.
Really shows that with smart and agile situation-response, you can turn an unpleasant circumstance into an opportunity.
People are primarily driven by price when they buy goods, so after 6 months or so people will forget this extremely generous act. Razer fans will remain razer fans, but unless Razer has a product leaps and bounds ahead of the competition (some are, but most are only marginally superior) very few will become loyal customers due to this act of kindness.
[1] http://businessmodelinstitute.com/is-customer-retention-the-...
The longtime Razer fans to some degree seem to be canceling their orders. At least with the ones you'll be shipping still I'd think the majority of those are strong PC gaming enthusiasts who have friends who are as well. Their stuff is quite shiny and attractive in general.
Certainly not!
This is not a bad thing for anyone, as they are currently sponsoring e-sports in a "big" way, and have done so for well over a decade now. I may no longer use or appreciate their gear the way I used to, but they definitely stand by their demographic. Definitely an ace move in by Razer here, in every regard.
I used Razer products since the Boomslang (with its floppy button problem, which was a material flaw, not component related). Among others, I had a Nostromo and Lachesis.
The Nostromo was nice enough, but had some pretty strange glitches (it would at times switch profiles and just act really strangely). The hand-rest was coated in some rubbery thing which absolutely loved to attract any dirt and dust in the room, and ended up requiring very frequent cleaning.
As for the Lachesis, there was a HUGE component flaw in the sensor, which was partially remedied by a ton of driver updates, but never fully fixed in my case. The cursor would drift, be subject to negative acceleration or simply not respond at all. Definitely not the kind of thing you'd want for any kind of input, really.
What Logitech offers for me in this case is seemingly iterative hardware development, and great support. It's not flawless, it's not flashy, but it's safe and they have excellent customer service to make up for it. I'm no longer young enough to care for flashy gear. ;)
Processing those orders doesn't seems that fair to me. Same rare people get 90% (!) off, all others don't. And FCFS isn't a cool, really fair principle. It is often used, because it is easy to implement and doesn't require more information than just time.
Also I expect the rate of people who ordered just because it is cheap and have no real appropriation is pretty high on that discount. Not talking about people who just wanna resell it on eBay.
What else could they have done?
* Make a general discount (e.g. 10-30%) for all potential
shoppers for the next weeks.
* Spend the lost money for development
* Hire more people
* Donate it to charity
* Make a challenge in any fair way. Again, time and
reaction is a pretty unfair criterion.
* Sponsorship
* ...
Also not sure if this is real marketing. Are their clients really that community based and speaking about such thing? Aren't more just angry because they hadn't the chance to use the opportunity?
Facebook comment (from source): "Well that's absurdly consumer friendly"
TL;DR: If you give some customers 90% discount for no reason, it means unfair prices for all others. Is that really consumer friendly?
Check the next comment on that post, a guy cancelling his order and redoing it at full price. It really is a strong community of enthusiasts.
Those customers who feel bad and were originally willing to pay the full price savings will likely cancel and reorder. Those customers who feel bad and genuinely could not pay the full price, will keep their discounted orders, and the company will get to keep those people as customers well into the future.
I'm curious how transparent they'll be with how many canceled their orders when the dust settles - would be a good case study for other companies in this boat who want to trust their customers to do the right thing for themselves.
You can find it at http://www.razerzone.com/synapse2 and the tech specs there state that "Valid e-mail, software download, license acceptance, and internet connection needed to activate full features and for software updates." For a bloody mouse driver.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121105/17594020942/when-m...
That said most of razer's customers are repeated purchasers and that honoring the orders is going to generate a lot of good will among its core customers. A very bold move though.
Edit: thanks for making it clearer below
If it's an honest mistake, there's no requirement to sell it, and beyond that most email confirmations say something like this from Amazon:
This e-mail is only an acknowledgement of receipt of your order and your contract to purchase these items is not complete until we send you an e-mail notifying you that the items have been dispatched to you.
In Germany, for example, displayed prices are merely an invitation to make an offer (”I want to buy this!”) which van then be accepted or rejected by the seller. Only if the seller accepts a contract of sale actually comes into existence. By the way, if the seller accepts but changes the conditions (by, say, changing the price) a contract of sale also doesn't exist. The buyer then has another chance to accept or reject this new offer.
It's pretty common sense, actually. Oh, and this doesn't mean that sellers can display wrong prices on purpose. That would be misleading advertising. But if it's a mistake it's not a problem.
Then they asked for my credit card info. Without https.
But I'm sure they did a full calculation of the costs that they'd have to eat if they honor this mistake and thought it was worth it for the good PR it would create.
I would think that it's not impossible that this was planned.
1234 as a coupon code is even something that people might find by mistake, meaning you wouldn't even have to try hard to seed the rumor. Just put it into the system and know that somewhere in the future, you will get a huge PR without much effort (other than stopping it after a certain period of time and accepting some losses).
To pull this off purposefully wouldn't even have to be too expensive, we have no way of knowing whether they are honouring thousands of orders or a couple of hundred. And regarding margins, a hell of a lot of the costs associated with a typical product sale come from distribution (the distributor takes a cut, the retailer/etailer takes a cut, plus MDF marketing costs), so this deal being through the Razer site will certainly help keep the losses down.
Also side note to jamornh: the Blade isn't available in the UK yet, so bad example - but your point still stands, 90% is definitely a loss.
If this was planned by Razer as a marketing trick then it is quite elaborate, although completely possible. There seems to be several hundred people on the comments who mentioned they made purchases and some would even cancel their order.
In order for this to be staged they would have to limit the number of times that the code could be used (allowable "loss" budget? max number of uses?) and then pretend to realize the mistake and take the site down at the right time (maybe when the "loss" reached a certain amount.) I guess it isn't completely inconceivable... but if that's the case, well-played Razer.
(And I don't think the Blade will ever be available outside North America. It's an irrelevant product that they created as a marketing gimmick.)
Selling those for $250 is obviously a massive loss on just the hardware alone.