[Replied] An open letter to Pimax and a suggestion to improve public perception

Pimax 8K Series
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@Sean.Huang @Matthew.Xu @anon74848233 @Doman.Chen @Alan.sun @PimaxVR @PimaxUSA

Great to hear all the recent news about the fixes with hardware and software and an expedited shipping process due to local warehouses opening and having received extra shipments of HMDs from Pimax.

Don’t mistake the fact that this is now your chance to become a huge competitor in the VR industry, with brand recognition and a realistic chance of competition with HTC Vive, Facebook and Samsung in the industry, and you still have that chance in light of your recent shortcomings concerning a lack of transparency and engagement with your backers ans customers concerning shipping status information and that of the 8k’s shipping status.

It’s a shame backers got agitated with the lack of news and public relations from your company in recent weeks, it isn’t too late to redeem yourselves in the eyes of public opinion though. Do your best from now on to improve your customer relations team engaging with the community, by email, and on the forums as well as through support tickets.

Many of us undoubtedly appreciate how much work you have left to do, how much work you have been doing and the improvements to the company you have already made, and this is one of the reasons you’ve been so busy.

Every company that grows big has small beginnings, and it’s definitely been a learning curve for Pimax to meet the demands of the public due to sheer interest in their product.

Although they must be faulted for their lack of engagement with their backers and customers, let’s hope that Pimax learns from this and sets a good example moving forward, and hopefully they make an extra effort to show improvement everywhere they can as it will surely be noted.

By the end of next month, every backer who has already confirmed accurate shipping information should have their headsets delivered, that’s the good news. And according to the information given by PimaxUSA in his recent interview with MRTV, pretty much all the hardware faults identified by backers have been in some way rectified or are now covered by warranty if they are not easily fixed, and software improvements are next on the list for pitool such as a settings profile among the other software implementation suggestions given.

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They lost any future business with me and anyone I know after shipping preorders before backers. After months of lying to us about the 8k production, the terrible CS, and rapid unannounced policy changes.

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They have reverted their policy on the black dots again, now you’re entitled to a replacement on a case by case basis (obviously to reduce massive amounts of returns when the issue is truely negligable.) Preorders were supposedly sent in the same batch with the last of the 5k+ backer headsets, and freight forwarders happened to deliver some of them to pre orders earlier than the backers in that shipment, because supposedly Pimax loses control of shipping priority once handled by a freight forwarder.

It looks bad but its just Pimax eager to sell and streamline shipping together of the 5k+ so everyone gets their devices sooner, instead of holding off all backers and preorders to wait until all the 8ks were produced.

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Well despite of your good intentions, this won’t change anything at all. There’s something very wrong with this company. Always has been and it’s not getting any better, arguably even worse. I think the only way to improve things would be to replace the management, since they’re the ones making the bad decisions, over and over again.

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Do you think it would be fair to attribute their negligence with engagement in public relations because of a language barrier between most of their employees/CSRs and the fact they’ve been overloaded with requests, support tickets, shipping, fixing software, marketing their product and developing peripherals (controller, wireless, base stations, head strap) recently, all at the same time with an insufficient amount of English speaking workers with a high enough level of proficiency to understand complaints and to meet the sheer demand of requests/orders/shipping etc?

I think so although I’m also of the view that Pimax are avoidant on responding to some issues when they have had nothing good to say or no new information to report.

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Obviously shipping was out of their hands they clearly couldn’t hold onto the preorders at the factory. for an extra week. And yes the language barrier and under staffing falls on them. Why you might ask? Simple they have had a year to build up to where they need to be for full retail and they chose not to.

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And wait an extra month to deliver them after the 8ks were ready? Seems inefficient, and probably happened because Pimax originally had a window for 29th of January to complete all 8ks, and the Preorders were originally planned to start being sent out at the start of February.

So you think it was better to delay everyone who preordered once they’d already announced preorders and taken them, once they realised they had a shortage of parts for the 8k and pushed its finished production date to the 8th of March?

I think what Pimax did is fair given the circumstances and development of a shortage of parts (screens) to meet the standards of production quality Pimax wanted for the 8k, and given the fact they’d already announced, taken and given a shipping date for preorders shortly before becoming aware of the part shortage, but they should have been more realistic with their release windows a long time ago, as not to generate false hype, raise expectations and failing to deliver on their badly estimated release windows repeatedly.

Technically all 5k preorders were sent last, with the last backers headsets in the same shipment as the last batch of backer 5ks, and I would suspect the same thing to happen again with the 8k when the last of them finish shipping.

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I’m fully aware that waiting till 8ks are done is ridiculous. However they ordered the panels in November 2017. The panel shortage has existed for a year. They chose to not gain some goodwill by letting us know about the shortage months ago and tell us then that preorders would ship before 8ks.

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Pimax have said, a couple of times at least I believe, that they had received 4k panels recently for the 8k, however it was noted by Pimax staff that the quality of the screens was not up to the standard they wanted for release, as a result they returned many of their screens received so that they could get better ones up to their standard.

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Well these certainly are some of the main issues, which any competent management would have foreseen. I’ve been watching Pimax for several years now and like @mixedrealityTV I’m oftentimes simply amazed by how they don’t seem to think ANYTHING through at all. Sometimes it’s funny but man, you just can’t run a company like that. I don’t think there’s any other solution than replacing management, which of course won’t happen. So no, I don’t believe things will get better.

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Nope was confirmed as BS.
https://community.openmr.ai/t/spreadsheet-update-18th-feb-2019/13865/295

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Don’t be so quick to state that’s true without concrete confirmation that that’s in fact the case.

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And let me ask you when you have to tell a consumer you are having to delay delivery do you: A) tell the truth or B) tell them it’s taking extra time because you’re improving the quality. And remember you can’t you normal sane logic you have to use piamx logic.

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The official response that you quoted above stated “only in recent months did decent quantities begin to arrive.
In fact the largest shipment of those panels will arrive a couple of days after factory reopens after CNY”

So according to the official response you quoted, they did receive decent quantities of screens in recent months (Before February or January), contrary to your assertion that they haven’t.
Your statement and the official response you quoted don’t add up.

Some reputable companies are known for not saying anything when theres nothing good to say or nothing to say on the issue, DICE as an example (and their official statement concerning the reasoning behind their lack of response to certain questions put to them by their gaming community.

Announcing a delay of delivery of either the preorders or the 8k meant either Backers or Pre orderers would have been upset. They found a solution in the middle ground (shipping preorders of the 5k and 8k with the last batch of 5k and 8k sent to backers), but shyed out from announcing it (I agree they should have said something) in hopes that it would go unnoticed.
Unfortunately people tend to get upset when promises are continually broken, and it is Pimax’s fault for making unrealistic promises and deadlines for themselves repeatedly.

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Why is that? People are receiving devices every day including 8k’s. Those panels really did begin to arrive in much greater numbers and now that we have people physically at the panel supplier even more. As we said some panels didn’t get through QA and that diminished the numbers somewhat. That statement was and is true.

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And my point still stands pimax chose to not give us that information until shortly before preorders were delivered. And their is a huge difference between saying that the problem was QA (which was said prior as the only reason for delays) and saying the panel supplier couldn’t well supply. Also you keep saying you produced so many 8ks yet the spread sheet only represents 54 being produced?

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They did tell everyone about the delay with the 8k screens several times actually, including before February, its just old information now buried in the forums.

Preorders being received just before the last backers is not even that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, all of the backer headsets produced had been sent out the time preorders had ever begun getting received. Why fault pimax for finding the middle ground to address these delays in light of having a shortage of high enough quality parts and for trying to get their product to everyone who bought it as soon as possible? Delaying shipping was not the best solution.

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Since CNY and for a few days prior to CNY all we’ve produced are 8k’s. I’ll see what I can do about getting the production numbers and get them to sync the spreadsheet but there were only something like 1238 remaining 8k’s to be produced 3 days before CNY. Vast majority of those are produced.

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They told us nothing they kept quiet and anytime they said anything it was nothing more than it progressing.

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Citation needed…:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: