If we deploy a bunch of systems based on the Photon or Electron, how reliable is this hardware?
In my humble opinion I think its still work in progress.
Flashing over the air does not have a 100% success rate, but rarely leaves the device in an unserviceable state, so a retry can be performed without user intervention.
There are still a number of bugs and stability issues on the photon hardware, which have not been getting much attention the last few months due to electron development.
The last firmware upgrade had a regression on “battery” backed variables, mistakes happen, but ideally issues like these should have been trapped before going live with the upgrade.
That said, I still believe the photon is the best WiFi solution available today, and improvements are happening.
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Thanks! What about long life? Is this dev hardware or something we can stick in a deployment and expect to get 5 years of life?
They have been around since the (Spark) core and the electron is likely to be a big success, tradiotionally cellular for small scale has been expensive and poor, now even oneoff development boards can get global roaming on the cheap 
But even if Particle closes, the photon is open enough to still be used, you can run a local cloud, or flash firmware over USB and use direct network connections so that the cloud is not required, at least for products that dont require frequent updates.
I’ve been using a Photon to control my dampers and HVAC motor without any major issues.
0.4.9 has been very good so far.
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