@zach attended the live Q&A. Thank you for hosting it.
There were a bunch of questions posted but it was mentioned that all questions were anwsered. I am assuming they were not seen and we also sort of ran out of time. Here are the questions I posted on the live Q&A stream.
- With regards to “some of us may not be networking experts”, that is true. However, those who need mesh badly enough will put the time and effort to figure this out or companies may even hire specifically to implement this internally. This will definitely help those who want mesh and will probably help mesh mature in the event Particle revisits mesh in the future.
- In addition, those who bought Gen 3 units are now paying for hardware that now cannot be used. To me this is a problem. Any considerations of a price adjustment with this feature cut? Now some may regret their decision and wished they bought an electron or photon instead.
- With regards to it not being the correct technology, I honestly do not buy that. The wireless technology may have limitations and It may not fit some use cases but having the ability an option to do so is much better than having no option. Especially coming for a product that pitches itself as a platform. Not all users will use all features on a platform, only those that are needed. In addition, the mesh management techniques, user flow will probably carry forward regardless of what wireless technology is used. You brought up using BLE for small micro networks, this is fine but what if we now have applications that need both BLE and micro networks simultaneously? With the deprecation of an option you now hinder the flexibility of the platform in general.
- I am an enterprise customer and I signed numbers for all 3 Argon, Boron and Xenon units. Now that mesh is gone, what will happen to my commitment numbers. Deprecation of mesh will now affect all numbers for all Gen3 skews.
- Any comments on bundling mesh into a 3rd party particle library? I brought this up a few posts ago:
One more point I would like to bring up in the live stream. You also mentioned the main focus of mesh was creating large networks over large range and then short 10m range of 2.4Ghz was not sufficient. This is the "ideal" and perfect scenario I agree. However, I see mesh at the moment as more of a cost saving solution. In the event I want a small number of devices (e.g. 5-10) connected out doors in close proximity, mesh solved the problem. With out it now I would have to purchase 5-10 Argons and Borons which are almost double or quadruple the price in terms of hardware. Our goal was to perhaps sell bundled pre configured sets of meshed 2-5 units to customers as a cheaper alternative then buying each gate way skew of the product.