Let me address one of the more common concerns being raised: “how can I ever trust Particle again?”
First, let me start by saying: I don’t think it’s unreasonable for any of you to have lost trust in us. Now it’s our job to earn your trust back, and I hope you’ll give us the opportunity.
One of the things that I personally learned from the Mesh launch is that we need to think differently about product launches for technologies that we are still exploring. We launched Mesh the same way we launched Wi-Fi and Cellular – with a bang. We did a big pre-order campaign, generated a lot of excitement around it, and made it a major element of our product portfolio.
In hindsight, this was foolish. At the time of the launch, we were absolutely excited about the potential for Particle Mesh, but we didn’t yet know how customers were going to use it in practice. The product needed some market discovery before we could really build confidence that the underlying technology (802.15.4 Thread-based mesh networking) was going to work for our customers.
What we should have done – and have now built into our product development process – is launch the product in beta. We should have been more transparent that there was still work to be done to explore how and when Particle Mesh would (or wouldn’t) be a good fit for customers.
The “Product Lifecycle Policy” that I’ve linked to in our documentation is somewhat new; we defined this policy after the Mesh launch was behind us. But going forward, it is something we intend to stick to. If we launch a product in GA (“generally available”), it’s fully supported and production ready. If we launch a product in beta, we’re still testing it.
If you’re going to trust us, it shouldn’t be blind trust. It should be because we’ve learned from the experience of this product launch and have baked those learnings into how we will do future product launches so that you can feel confident about the future of products in GA while, if you’re interested in doing so, exploring new technologies with us in beta.