Sadly I can't sell you a binding pre-order contract. (That would be where you couldn't cancel your order) And for things like the Nexus 4 (where you might engage in a bit of reselling) you will have people 'pre-order' to get a place in line, only to find when they start shipping that you can't sell them for much of a markup on ebay so they cancel their pre-order. Or like the great disk drive crisis of 2011 where people put multiple orders into multiple distributors only to cancel when one of them filled.
Another thing to consider (and this was true of the Nexus 4 and later updated in the article) the article said they 'sold out' but Google didn't. The authors interpreted not being able to get to a sales page as being 'sold out' but later discovered that there was some order rate management going on where the 'overflow' went to the 'coming soon' page and repeated attempts would eventually get you a page you could order from.
Logistics management is a tricky thing, if you are good at it you can pretty much name your own salary because its trivially easy to 'show' how much you are worth with basic accounting techniques. If the company has the volume you can literally say "If you hire me I'll save you $700,000 a year, I'll actually save you $1,000,000 a year but I'm going to keep $300,000 of it as salary."
Another thing to consider (and this was true of the Nexus 4 and later updated in the article) the article said they 'sold out' but Google didn't. The authors interpreted not being able to get to a sales page as being 'sold out' but later discovered that there was some order rate management going on where the 'overflow' went to the 'coming soon' page and repeated attempts would eventually get you a page you could order from.
Logistics management is a tricky thing, if you are good at it you can pretty much name your own salary because its trivially easy to 'show' how much you are worth with basic accounting techniques. If the company has the volume you can literally say "If you hire me I'll save you $700,000 a year, I'll actually save you $1,000,000 a year but I'm going to keep $300,000 of it as salary."