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Comment by cyberneticcook | Hacker News Reader

I understand your frustration but I think pre-orders are important for them to understand how many units to manufacture. What if they produce too many, and people don't buy them ? what if too little and they can't cope with the demand ?

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Another way of looking at it is that the delivery horizon is too long. In six months there will be other similar products announced and probably released. I fell like 2015 so so far out that the value of pre-order as a forecasting tool is minimal.

Acceptable and calculable business risks. How did new products launch before the internet?

I can think of an example of an industry that has been doing pre-sales to fund production for a long time and that's property development.

That's what market research really is good for. And frustrating potential users to minimize your business risks isn't acceptable, in my opinion. There's always risk involved. That's the nature of business.

"That's what market research really is good for."

Pre-orders can be an excellent form of market research.

Don't think you can consider it research if you are billing people, it's just business/sales.

It seems like getting people to commit to pre-orders is possibly the best form of market research. You've done enough R&D to get a solid outline of what the product will be, and you're testing whether or not people are actually willing to put money on the line to get ahold of it.

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