I think they probably did. When I worked for a large software company we often released products with well known issues. Well known to the corporate bosses that is. They would be told the release sucked, but meeting the release dates were more important to them. We were told release it now then fix it later. Or as we use to say in mocking them, "We don't have time to do it right, but apparently we have time to redo it later"! I don't know if that is what happened, but with all the speculation and leaks and hype generated by the press even before release, Amazon might have felt they needed to release it even if it wasn't quite ready. Plus Kobo and Nook already had released theirs, and from what I read the PW is better than those. So maybe it was a yes this isn't very good but at least it is better than the competitions' models kind of decision.