“On November 17, our deadline date for greenlighting the debut three days later, the CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject ‘no good news.’ Yuck, I thought. Another delay, probably with the screen that had been giving us so much trouble – capacitive touch at 12 inches isn’t trivial. And sure enough, the email started off with ‘no good news to update. updated hardware is still on its way , so that’s a timing issue. friday will be a challenge now,'” Arrington “reports.”
“But the email went on. Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement,” Arrington states. “Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.”
“Chandra also forwarded an internal email from one of his shareholders. My favorite part of the email: ‘We still acknowledge that Arrington and TechCrunch bring some value to your business endeavor…If he agrees to our terms, we would have Arrington assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head and Fusion Garage would acquire the rights to use the Crunchpad brand and name. Personally, I don’t think the name is all that important but you seem to be somewhat attached to the name,'” Arrington states. “And with that, the entire project self destructed.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Color us wholly unsurprised.
That TechCrunch tablet thing (CrunchPad) is just plain weird (unless it’s a publicity stunt, in which case it’s genius). If it’s real, the weirdness lies not the actual tablet so much (which, last we heard, sounds too heavy, among other things, to fly), but the maker(s). We’re not sure the comfort level is there for prospective buyers. We’d launch our own tablet, but, alas, we’re cursed with too much sense. – MacDailyNews Take, August 18, 2009
I think I’d rather wait for the real thing instead a hastily cobbled-up version of vaporware.
Arrington = arrogant asshat. Maybe now this self-important frigtard blogger will understand that technology is not a child’s game. And perhaps he will begin t appreciate what Apple has accomplished. Being the wanna-be that he is, perhaps he’d like to crash a White House dinner…
Typical, those who can, do.
Those who can’t, should stick to writing about it.
“I’m just sad, I don’t know squat about manufacturing, law, business, or anything else. I just kinda thought that things would work out…”
Cccc can’t we all just get along? Next I’m going to invent a hand cranked computer for $100.00 and it will change the world – until reality sets in.
Screw you Mike Arrington
I would have liked to have seen them produce something that costs only $300 to mfr, with a 12″ capacitive screen.
MacDailyNews can be such dicks. Techcrunch seem like cool people with a fun project. I thought it would be nice to see it in the market. I guess Techcrunch is taking traffic away from all the pop-ups on this site… I hate people who are happy when others fail.
This thing always seemed to be “pie-in-the-sky” but the email–if true–is truly bizarre. There are probably about a dozen other ways Fusion Garage could have hijacked the product which would have been a lot stealthier and avoided many legal problems.
The method they chose seems to be begging for a court battle.
Looks like they had it made in India? The guy with the cash box ran away?
‘Cool people with fun projects’ usually turn out to be tits on an ego trip. No exemption here then because to make cool things actually work it helps to have some business acumen too, or at least legal claim over what you are doing.
Just read the article. I don’t know why everyone’s coming down on them. It seems to me that they were only trying to recreate the scenario that Jobs and Woz originated all those years ago – a few guys with stars in their eyes who wanted to give people something good.
The product itself looked fine and we should be sad it won’t see the light of day even if was only to keep Apple on their toes and provide decent competition which, lets face it, they’re never going to get from the likes of MS and Dell.
Arrington is a total dumbass.
Guess Errington never thought he’d be zuckered. Hope he’s got a work estimate/contract in writing, owns the legal name to CrunchPad, patented some features, or have open sourced/licensed the whole project to begin with.
These guys are idiots.
If their manufacturing partner could just “walk off” with the whole project, what does that say about the product they’ve designed? That they didn’t bring anything to it themselves. That they just cobbled together a bunch of off the shelf hardware and software.
TechCrunch obviously doesn’t “own” any of it.
FoxConn can’t sell iPhones because the iPhone is more than a collection of off the shelf parts. The manufacturing partner doesn’t own any of the intellectual property. Apple created and owns the OS, iTunes and the pre-installed Apps. They own the logic board design, the industrial design, the custom chip designs. They have patents on key technologies that go into the product. Apple has brought a lot of value to the equation.
If building a popular, working gadget was that easy, the other Michael (Dell) would be selling one by now. There is a reason why Apple and Google are so secretive about their clandestine plans and own such sharp legal teams. Arrington should’ve stick with people who can help him honestly, like the Open Moko project.
one of the reasons Apple not announcing their product before they’re ready for release makes sense
Apple will do it much better and a whole lot cooler…if they do it at all.
the dog ate arrington’s crunchpad.
@Mike Arrington
This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.”
Um, no, it isn’t and stop comparing yourself to Apple. What a maroon.
Hopefully this will put an end to all the anti-Apple slime that Arrington tried to cook up to push this product. Expecting him to switch back to iPhone any day now…
Michael Arrington is a former attorney who once worked for Wilson Sonsini, one of the most highly regarded law firms in the Silicon Valley. (They were a law firm for NEXT, for example.) That Arrington, who had access to high-end legal advice, failed to create iron-clad agreements that assured him control of his own project, is patently ridiculous. Whether he might eventually prevail legally is moot. By the time this winds through the courts, Apple will likely have launched and grabbed the market for tablets. And Arrington will have little more than broken dreams and more blog fodder.
We can all cheer on two guys in a garage. But for every pair of Steves, there are a thousand Michael Arringtons you rarely hear about, more litter along the trail of broken dreams.
The moral of the story: if you are going to partner, make sure you have a kick-ass contractual agreement. That an attorney like Arrington failed on this is pathetic.
#FAIL
This info is purely promotional and fake. No legitimate business would reveal details in that way. Stupid and fake. I find that TechCrunch now has zero credibility for the future in any endeavor. Pure self-promotional, fake, crap news.
I just looked at the open moko referenced by acid and realized immediately why I had never heard of it.
It is LAME, when are you Linux geeks gonna figure out how to build a decent ui. Why on gods green earth would I want a phone with 64mb to 256mb of on board disk space.
“Uhh let me see I have that app I need right now on one of these sd cards” Yeah, just what people want more tiny pieces to lose and a nightmare ui with no real tech support.
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_1973_hardware