Jolla just announced that many Jolla Tablet backers won’t be getting their tablets. As part of their restructuring, they just ran out of money.
This is why I haven’t done anything with Kickstarter on hardware. It’s very high risk. With software, we can change and restructure. It can evolve. Hardware is much more difficult to evolve.
Even though Jolla is technically a semi-competitor, I do hope they bounce back enough to thrive as a company. I was a MeeGo supporter, advocate, and even briefly an engineer. It’s how I cut my teeth in x86 development, really. But, while I didn’t sign on to Jolla as a platform – I do believe there needs to be a tertiary platform out there besides Android/Windows/iOS.
There should be an open platform out there that challenges that, always.
Jolla Tablet was a huge gamble, and while it raised a lot of money for Jolla… much like Ouya, most of that was tied up in deliverables. When things hit the rocks, they had to tap that money – hoping to replenish on the next funding round. It didn’t come, clearly.
This does bring up one important point. People backing a crowdfunding effort are contributing to an idea. People who treat it as a store, will be disappointed, and may actually hurt others who support the idea in the long run. Those who are unwilling to embrace even the slightest of project changes, face bringing so much vitriol to the rest of the community, that it undermines efforts to bounce back completely.
With Console OS, we almost got caught in that corner when Android-IA for PC hardware was shut down… almost one month to the day after our first release. 2015 was tormentous year, as a result. And 2016 got off to a rocky start. But my team is committed to staying the course.
Hopefully Jolla is too. Perhaps someday they’ll deliver on those remaining tablet orders – or generate enough funding to cover refunds.