We would like to start by thanking our customers and the community that have helped us constantly grow over the last ten years. In early 2014, we decided to temporarily stop any new product development and concentrate on taking a look back on optimizing our production, to tweak costs and improve quality.
Today, we are drastically dropping prices on almost all of our .NET Gadgeteer products and also discontinuing some. The catalog now shows the products to be discontinued as “legacy” and they are put out of stock, to be removed in a few days. The remaining products have been updated with the new prices. Please visit our catalog to check out all of the new exciting prices.
So, what will happen to the discontinued products? Any existing stock will be sold at deep discounts or will be donated to educational programs. Once we are out of stock, the products will be available through special order only. It should be noted that most of the discontinued products are open source allowing anyone to manufacture these modules if needed.
We hope that the new prices will be to everyone’s liking and also hope that fewer offers will invite more makers and companies to create new Gadgeteer modules. Just like the creation section in our community that already hosts many creative modules.
This major change will help us focus on .NET Gadgeteer, one of the technologies that we love and support. This will also allow us to provide our customers with the highest quality products at the lowest possible prices.
While no one can complain about lower prices, I am a bit confused as to discontinuing the J11D. My understanding is that is this the only ethernet connector that can be used with the FEZ Spider. Did I misunderstand that and you can actually use the ENC28? Or is the Spider to be phased out as well?
Oh no… 44 out of 93 modules are marked as Legacy. I was not happy with current variety of modules and from now on it will be even worse (much worse).
That’s not Gadgeteer spirit at all. Gadgeteer is all about Plug-and-Play. It should not involve making hardware if you are a regular user of this platform.
I don’t see companies getting involved in this (but I could be wrong here). Makers won’t offer the same level of support GHI could offer for their production. Another thing - maker can one day be here and another day he can be gone. Credibility will be on a different level.
And even if I am wrong with all this, what about mean time? There will be no Audio module and there is no alternative from community for example. What should a regular user do in this case? I think you GHI had to ensure a proper transition period.
P.S. Even Gadgeteer socket is marked as Legacy. What? :think:
The change on J11D is a mistake. It will be adjusted.
As for the other comments, when we had to pick between more options or lower prices we decided to go with lower prices. We understand that some, especially commercial customers, prefer more options over lower prices but the majority of customers we asked wanted lower prices.
As for lower shipping costs, we hope to revisit this in the near future and see if our shipping partners will give us lower shipping prices. GHI does not plan on making money on the shipping fee
Hmmm this is interesting. It also coincides with my UK provider of all things Gadgeteer having a clear out sale. I ordered some stuff from them today.
However this whole price reduction thing worries me. In the catalog there is now nothing that says legacy only out of stock. Which says that there wasn’t much stock anyway. With the massive reduction in Module offerings I can only assume that not enough was being sold and this isthe beginning of a slow retraction of Gadgeteer from the market. Ive been around product manufacturing for long enough to see the signs plain and simple.
Maybe I’m being a bit paranoid. As a module maker this is potentially a good thing but I’m not going to invest time and money in making modules if what i suspect is happening is happening.
Yes they will go on sale next week. We are making sure we did not make mistakes on the catalog first (looks like we made few mistakes already! Fixing as we speak…)
You are reading this wrong We are about to move to our new building, where we have organized everything differently and we also need to reduce our stock. The new changes will allow us to reduce prices. We are also increasing the batch sizes in production, which also helps in reducing prices. Like I just mentioned in the previous post, it is simply a trade off between more options and lower prices.
Also, you are not expected to make modules if you do not want to but when we (the largest Gadgeteer provider) provide less hardware we leave room for other companies and makers to come and join the great world of .NET Gadgeteer. We hope so at least
@ Gus - Great that’s cool. I am glad i am wrong (not often i say that )
This just gave me the jitters i suppose. I am all for more people to join the gadgeter making world.
Thanks for clearing it up for me.
We are about to move to our new building, where we have organized everything differently and we also need to reduce our stock. The new changes will allow us to reduce prices. We are also increasing the batch sizes in production, which also helps in reducing prices. Like I just mentioned in the previous post, it is simply a trade off between more options and lower prices.