>They could have opted to not use the pre-order money to fund their operations
Exactly. Sequestering pre-order money - at least some fraction of it - should have been one of the first orders of business for any company who cares about integrity.
People talk about this as customers, but: surely the point of pre-order money in many cases is precisely to fund operations - to provide the working capital needed to do manufacturing?
If I have a hardware product that costs $80 to make (x10,000) and I'm selling it on Kickstarter for $100, are you saying that after taking in a million on kickstarter I should just sequester it and then find a spare $800k to do the actual manufacturing?
The key difference here is that the manufacturing never actually happened. They seem to have used preorder money to fund other steps in the process but never actually made the product beyond some initial devices.
Kickstarter to fund manufacturing should happen at the appropriate time in the process, if you're "doing it the right way."
Exactly. Sequestering pre-order money - at least some fraction of it - should have been one of the first orders of business for any company who cares about integrity.