Morals and Ethics of Pre Orders

Yes eero, waiting sucks. Frustrating is putting it mildly.

But there’s more to it than just testing our patience. Here’s a recap of timeline of my interaction with eero:

• Heard about it in early Feb, 2015
• Placed pre-order Feb 11, 2015
• Went to eero offices to give my feedback (I’ve had some experience with wireless mesh networks at home) early April, 2015
• Pinged eero for updates in May, July and September
• Each update, when it arrived, kept pushing out the delivery date from summer, then fall, then November and as we’ve heard today, “early 2016”

When you ask customers to put their faith (and their money) into your unproven, untested product, they are making a leap of faith. This is an honor code and while there’s no laws or regulations around pre-order commitments, you cannot just play fast and loose with their trust.

This is what eero’s twitter feed looks like on most days: full of apologies

I’m happy that you’ve raised $40 million. Of course it is easy for you to say you’ll refund our money, no questions asked. With that war chest, you no longer need our piddly pre-order dollars.

If/when eero finally ships, it will likely be more than 1 full year since I placed my pre-order. This is ludicrous. In any other context, this would be unacceptable and yet we tolerate it because it was a “pre-order”.

But is it ethical? What does the moral compass dictate?

Me personally? I’d really like to see is eero return the good faith early adopters have shown: give us back our money now, with a commitment to honor the pre-order price whenever eero ships, if I still want to buy one.

Your move, eero

An optimistic, but disappointed, early customer.