I’ve been holding out hope that the team over there is just busy with developing GFv2, and that is why there is little progress on the promised features (continuous autofocus, highly accurate visual alignment, auto-alignment for flipped over material, passthrough alignment, auto detection of phones/tablets, etc.).
I would think it’s premature to start developing new hardware when they haven’t even gotten the first one right (or even released, in the case of the air filter.) But that seems to be their standard procedure, so who knows?
The low hanging fruit is ignored, and only updates of very little utility seem to creep out. This would lead one to think they are sandbagging, and planning to include all these wonderful enhancements in a new product.
They’ll have a riot on their hands if they do this. But then again, pissed off customers don’t seem to bother them.
Then, they go and do something like the autofocus speed up. I don’t seem to recall any torch bearing mobs storming GF HQ because the autofocus wasn’t fast enough.
They weren’t. I imagine this was some employee’s big idea for the month, and when you have no big improvements to report, you blow small improvements out of proportion. This enhancement would have taken an experienced coder all of a few hours to implement and test.
So, why expend developer time on it? And why roll it out in such a haphazard way that it ends up taxing your already overworked support staff, and further damaging your shaky QA reputation?
Here’s my take on it: they have an incredibly inexperienced team trying to do some very hard things. Dan has prioritized hiring a young and diverse (and presumably inexpensive) workforce over hiring an experienced one, and it shows. Look how long it’s taken to get to this point (minimally functional product, no real enhancements since launch, long list of unfulfilled promises.) Compare that to what one guy has been able to do with a few months of spare time here. Imagine where they’d be if Glowforge had just hired a half dozen @ScottW514’s to start with.
BTW - it looks like shortly after we chatted about their mixed Glassdoor reviews, there are two new reviews up there (this one and this one , both dated Aug 30) that look suspiciously like they were written by a marketing person.
Glassdoor is notorious for looking the other way in exchange for cash when HR posts shill reviews.
And the reports of a strong top-down management culture are more evidence of the inexperience of the team - it’s a common mistake made with young, inexperienced managers.