I agree with you in a way, and it’s a frustrating thought as the Moog One would so nicely round out my studio for the foreseeable.
On the one hand, I’m totally convinced that the Moog team want to do right by the product. This is evident in the sheer amount of effort and time they spent soliciting industry feedback to shape the design, as well as the aspiration to rise above ‘also-rans’ in terms of featureset and do something special. I also understand that at some point, if you don’t release a product, then you can’t recover losses - which can eventually lead to the death of the product because of cash starvation.
On the other hand, it seems impossible that Moog wasn’t aware of the ‘defect profile’ of the device (for lack of a better term) prior to release, and seemed to take the route of glossing over those bugs in the early campaigning (webcasts, etc). Following on from that, the firmware updates have been very slow. I don’t underestimate the effort required, but zooming out on the last few months, it seems to me that the expectation set for improvements is not matching the velocity of changes rolling out.
In addition (and to be quite frank), the people leading the last couple of webcasts have not been the most appropriate choice. I fully understand the appeal of putting engineers in front of the customer (e.g. ‘let’s show passion from inside the team, let’s give thoughtful responses while we’re on the webcast’, etc etc), but the 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 webcasts just left me feeling that development will more or less continue on a trajectory that is not significantly affected by real customers. Maybe this is just in the way things were explained/handled on the webcast, but even so - keep Amos (or other product leads) in the drivers seat with engineers on hand to get into detail if need be. The whole point of a UX-led design process is changing direction according to what is most useful to the customer, even if this means abandoning theoretically elegant solutions.
Confidence from the customer base in early launch stages is absolutely essential to the success of the product, regardless of what the product is. Customer sentiment is just as important if not more important than objective progress in the beginning.
In that respect, until we’re out of the woods with the defects preventing normal function of currently listed specifications, I think Moog should be working overtime to communicate carefully and comprehensively with their customers - that includes lead times - and indicate ‘direction of travel’ against commonly stated requests beyond that. Without doing so, they are risking the wind coming out of the sails, and losing the opportunity to grow (and/or shift) their customer base - particularly in view of the supply issue.
And sure, they run the risk of hinting at a feature that may not come to pass, but it seems to me more risky to give no indications whatsoever. A balance between these concerns should be possible.
Even though Moog has customers and potential customers that really believe they can create both an extraordinary AND stable synth, it does not mean that those customers have infinite patience. We will want to use these synths as reliable tools in our studios today, and we will want confidence we are not sinking cash into a questionable investment.
All that being the case - those of us with pre-orders are left thinking about whether we should pull out, which I’m assuming would cause a mess in terms of manufacturing queue and materials costs.
I’d really like to see a change in approach that at least goes part way to address the above.
Thoughts from others on this?
I’d rather work with people on a forum that is dedicated to the Moog One .