[Saygus V²] AdamColligan:
You're missing the bigger problem

People's expectations about what information Saygus would provide -- and when -- did not just emerge out of thin air. Pre-order customers expected by email on Monday afternoon exactly what Saygus explicitly told us to expect. As for Twitter, Saygus chose to use its twitter feed rather than any other communications format, including updating a web page, to say that details would be ready on Monday. It's not arbitrary to expect that Saygus would then use Twitter to correct that statement. It was clear what the company was saying it would do; it was not a figment of the customers' imaginations.

But the bigger problem here is this effort by Saygus to pretend that the customers misunderstood rather than just admitting that they missed their self-imposed deadline. This effort has sounded terribly lame to me, which is why I really am confused at posts like the one quoted above that buy into it. The deadline they missed was not necessarily critical. But if the company isn't being honest about it, that's a whole different kind of issue, and it becomes important to make sure that the record is set straight.

- Saygus did not just promise vague "infos". The email on Saturday said that "complete details" for "shipping information" would be "available" "Monday afternoon ([MDT])". It also said that "[a]long with the shipping details, we will be emailing you some additional information on Monday."

- That means you should have received an email with those two distinct sets of information. And you should have received it before Monday evening, not before Monday midnight. Anyone should feel free to correct me if they received the country-list email at any time before 12:08am MDT on Tuesday (0608 UTC). So the email that did go out wasn't "last minute"; it was late -- and not by 8 minutes but by more like 6 hours.

- The email did not contain complete shipping information for any customer in any country. If a customer's country was listed, he or she only received, at most, a dollar amount with no further explanation or instructions. It would be hard to even call that "partial" shipping information.

- The email did not contain any shipping information for the United States, and it apparently did not contain any relevant explanation for this glaring omission. I say "apparently" because there was a line in the email that some countries' shipping details would have to be updated later due to "additional costs". But if we are to believe that US shipping is something like $8-13, there is clearly no "additional cost" reason for the delay. Saygus just chose to leave the US out and ignore the fact that it was left out, because to acknowledge it would mean admitting that they missed their deadline for accepting a shipping bid. And they're clearly obsessed with not admitting that they "delayed" anything.

- The email did not contain any of the "additional information" that was promised on top of the "complete" shipping information. Saygus' representatives also stated that no such information was available.

- Saygus' representatives were clearly instructed not to be honest about the reasons why the paltry Monday night email was both late and almost entirely incomplete. When contacted before the country-list email went out, Saygus said that it was sending emails in batches all over the world and had been sending them since Saturday. So right off Saygus obviously knew which expected email customers were asking about -- since it was the Saturday email that had made the promise -- but it chose to pretend to be ignorant of what customers were asking about and say, "oh, we've been sending lots of emails". That's bad enough just for how childish it is. But I also strongly suspect that there was no actual significant time delay in the "batching" of the single incomplete message that did go out. People have speculated that their CMS or SMTP program paces the send rate. But everyone seems to have received the completely non-customized email at the same time. And if you view the source code of the email, you'll see it was sent from the mcsv.net domain -- that means they're using MailChimp, not some Raspberry Pi in mom's basement. It seems easy to conclude, then, Saygus reps were deliberately deceiving inquiring customers by telling them to believe that *other* people were receiving what was promised and that they just needed to be patient and wait their turn.

- Worse, at least in the chat I had earlier Monday evening, they characterized what had supposedly already "started being sent out" as an "email with the complete information".

- Again, who cares since the particular deadline was such a little thing? That's just it -- shouldn't they be accountable for lying/BSing so elaborately over something so petty?

- Through random third parties, the company also later gave contradictory information about when to expect a follow-up that actually delivered what the original email was supposed to.