The Crunchpad Crashes and Burns
This will go down as a legend most assuredly. The Crunchpad is not to be. I’ll let Michael Arrington speak as to why:
Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.
And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.
You should read the entire post on TechCrunch, because after doing so several times, I find there are some curious blanks that haven’t been filled in. Apparently Fusion Garage the company making the Crunchpad for Arrington has decided to go on its own and send the product to market without the Crunchpad label.
Bizarre, sad, twisted, and oh, so disappointing.
Category: Hardware
Disappointing but not entirely unexpected.
I really wanted one, but I would have great difficulty buying it from this company after seeing how they handled the deal with Arrington. I have not been kind to Mike Arrington in the past, but as I see it, the CrunchPad was his idea and his brand. Seems as though he was double-crossed in some weird and unfathomable way.
I have a bad feeling about the documentation regarding the IP. Michael would do well to act quickly with a quality legal team.
I do this work and his explanation of the “joint ownership” sounds like a problem waiting to happen!
Well, good luck to that other company. Without the hype of “crunchpad”, I bet they’ll sell even less than if they had the power of the name on their side.