Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffC
Don't forget Bookeen started in 2003 , with ideas from 1998 ; some might argue they've had plenty of time to develop their business and evolve past some of the issues that have been mentioned .
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Well, you have to keep in mind that Bookeen is a tiny company.
Writing and testing firmware updates is fairly labor intensive. For a small company that means either writing a single large firmware and thoroughly tested update or a number of small ones and release them to a smaller/limited group of technically savvy users. Bookeen has chosen the latter, which is in my opinion a good idea.
As for product development they don’t have enough side business needed to support a lengthy research en development cycle. Established companies have a diverse product range in order to generate enough overhead whilst developing new products.
Bookeen is both too small and has started development in a niche market. Bookeen probably has little or no cash coming in whilst they are spending heaps developing a new product. In practice this means finding a investor or borrowing money from a bank at personal risk.
This money eventually runs out at that point it’s usually a case of market it as is or not at all.
But all this is Bookeens problem not yours, but people who buy this product, like you and me have the means to be aware of this state of affairs.
I don’t really think Bookeen will evolve beyond this state of affairs anytime soon unless e-book readers become really popular. As long as it remains an early adopters market, product life cycles will stay short and development cost will remain high. I think bookeen will stay with the gen3 just long enough to get it roughly up and running and profitable. After which they will probably switch over to development of the gen4. But that’s rather dependant on the development of the e-book market.
This however does not excuse the poor customer support Bookeen provides.
The current e-mail support system is pretty unprofessional. But then again this is probably also caused by the relatively small size of the company and the sudden skyrocket in demand that apparently caught them flatfooted. This will probably improve with time. The current support system was probably good enough when they sold a limited number of gen1’s and gen2’s but it’s definitely not sufficient with the current sales and geographical diversity of the gen3.