my AO G4XE will arrive beginning April 2003 :-)

[MarkTime]

if eyetech had no pre-orders, their estimation of the Amiga market would go *up* a notch.

pre-ordering is really a mistake, its not an incentive to produce more, its the opposite.  The goal is to make money....pre-ordering suggests that you can get the money without actually producing anything.  Strobe correctly pointed out, that pre-ordering suggests ignorance and lack of savvy.  Even companies accepting the money don't really have 'respect' for the people who pre-order.

Consider Amiga, Inc. how much respect do they show the club members, when month after month goes by, and they don't produce the t-shirt.

I hope you are not offended, I don't know you personally, and I am not speaking therefore, directly to you personally.  It's not an attack on you, in specific, but that is how pre-orders are perceived by many people.

FYI, pre-paying breeds disrespect and contempt, especially by those who are taking the money.  

Just think about it, a person.....or a group of people, usually develops a reputation over time.  A person can have any type of reputation...'cheap', 'generous', 'tough', 'weak', 'kind', 'cruel', etc.....

It seems that a certain segment of the amiga hobbyists is determined to develop the reputations
'easy mark', 'gullible', 'soon parted with their money'.

Hey, go for it....but its really totally unnecessary...nobody has suggested a good reason yet to pre-order.  Does Alan really need the money badly?  His business cannot survive without a community loan?   The idea, that somehow Alan 'needs' the money as an incentive, seems to be the most common myth presented as a reason for pre-ordering.

If this is really true, that he needs the money,  it would be important to know it!  Let Alan confirm it.  If he's on the virge of bankruptcy, he should tell all his potential investors and pre-order loan friends in the Amiga community, so they can choose (or choose not to) loan him money in the form of a pre-order.....

I'd hate to see people lose their investment....loaning money to someone on the virge of bankruptcy, is *STUPID*.

Now....he's not on the virge of bankruptcy.   That was just a discussion about the reasons that were presented.  Fact is...he's not going bankrupt and he can conduct business in the usual fashion.  There is no need or good reason to pre-order.  Prices go down, markets shift.  It is wise to wait.

[MarkTime]

I see thanks for the clarification.

In pre-ordering, you haven't sent a payment, but simply made a gesture indicating that you will purchase the board when it ships, but are under no obligation to do so.  I.E. you could cancel the pre-order.  By the same token, after listening to the other responses, I see that Eyetech is also not under any obligation to commit to any particular pricing.

With that said, I'm not sure what you have done...perhaps gotten some of the paperwork of ordering done in advance, if there is a significant backlog of orders, perhaps you will recieve your board a day before someone else in the queue...

I stand corrected.  Certainly this 'pre-order' scheme doesn't amount to anything worth commenting on.

My confusion came from comment number one of this thread:

>>Hi

>>Will send money today

[MarkTime]

this is an edit: (w/o a response yet, I decided to edit to be more eloquent)

A magazine publisher is actually responding to the wishes of their customers.  Use a 24 issue subscription as an example.  I get a discount for buying 24 issues over one.  Great, that is a value to me.  I can purchase at the newstand if I want, but I have the option of this great discount.

Secondly, the publisher of the magazine would love to fulfill that order for 24 magazines, with 24 copies of a March 1998 back issue that is rotting in a warehouse somewhere.  Apparantly their St.Patrick's Day with Monica Lewinsky special edition never sold as well as they hoped.

But they can't.  You see it is me, as the SUBSCRIBER demanding that they send me only 24 future issues, once each month for 2 years.  That is what I want, an information service...not simply 24 issues .  And yes, I expect this service to begin almost immediately, I do not plan to pre-order for the 'service'...only that I want the service to continue for 2 years.    If I wanted back issues, I would have ordered them....that is offered...if I wanted 24 copies of this months issue, i could do that as well.

The difference between an $800 motherboard and a $5 dollar magazine are two fold...both very important.  One is 800 dollars, compared to 5.   One is a magazine and the other a motherboard.

Before I edited this, I rambled on and on about the importance of SCALE and CONTEXT, but this letter is more concise.  A magazine publisher doesn't show contempt .

But when a company takes pre-payments on computer equipment, its unusual.....and this strangeness is almost always for a reason.
Its anecdotal evidence, to be sure...but I have seen the reason for this unusual behaviour, many times....its because a company is either a cheat, or well meaning, but without much money.  In the latter case, many well meaning people have taken people's money and never delivered any product.

And that, ultimately, is a huge sign of disrespect, to take people's money and not deliver any product.

Now I liked the way you linked the unrelated topic of magazine subscriptions and pre-paying for a motherboard, and I also liked the way you highlighted my nickname in your response....both are cool concepts, but, again, scale and context, they can't be dismissed when making those leaps in logic.  :-o  :-o  :-o

OK I edited this about 7 times...I'm done! LOL...sorry about that, just kept seeing opportunities for improvement, and I am keeping myself busy...I'm waiting on something nonAmiga related....
 :-)

Cheers, Robert aka MarkTime