OnePlus recently held another Ask Me (Almost) Anything on Reddit, answering some tough questions from those still clamoring for the company’s flagship phone (or at least following the dramatic saga that is the OnePlus One). One pair of questions, as you might imagine, centered on how long we’ll still need invites to order the device and why we’re still stuck with the invite system at all. This is what CEO Carl Pei had to say about why we still have to get an invite:
Things definitely haven’t gone as planned. Looking back, we probably misjudged demand by 30x, and are scrambling to catch up. Our team wasn’t built to handle this growth. We’re hiring like crazy, and things should be under control in a few months.
When asked when we’ll be able to simply order online without needing a reservation or invite:
Not in 2014. We understand that our current method may be slowing our growth down, but we’d rather grow slower and in a healthy way than taking too much risk and going out of business. Risk management is extra important in our scenario where we don’t have hardware margins.
The takeaway is that they were so averse to taking any significant risk of overproduction they ended up going to the other extreme – grossly underestimating demand. To be fair, as a brand new company it’s understandable that they don’t have the ability to absorb much risk and they can easily miss the mark in projecting demand without any experience with prior products.
What happened instead is a boatload bad PR the invite system has drawn from frustrated customers in addition to the bad PR they already exposed themselves to with their endless bragging and trolling along with a couple of poorly conceived contests. Despite having a greater understanding of the demand they can expect, they still don’t want to risk overproduction so they must continue with the invite system (with a brief preorder period in October).
Despite all the bad PR, people are still clamoring for the OnePlus One, even though Snapdragon 805 devices with QHD displays are mere weeks away from arriving at your favorite carrier or retail store. The reality is you still can’t beat a device with a Snapdragon 801, a 1080p display, 64GB storage, CyanogenMod out of the box and “fastboot oem unlock” for $350. Nobody else has beaten that offer to this day, and I expect it to still be a killer deal even in early 2015. Oh, wait – I had forgotten about the Nexus line ;).
Source: Reddit, h/t Android Authority
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