Hello @zach
Hope you (or someone from particle) find sometime to read my post in your busy day. I’ll TRY to keep this short, but some of my honest feedback here so it might be a bit of a read. I’ll also be attending the Thursday live Q&A and will ask questions there, so I guess just some headups.
I’ve read through your post multiple times as well as a good chunk of the replies. Before I start:
- Particle as a platform has been great for us so far. There are still many features that we are happy with and we will continue using Particle as an enterprise customer.
- Particle has done a lot of things right and somethings wrong. Mesh is one of the wrong things and @zach I appreciate the honest and transparent post. The launch of mesh was also a mistaken as addressed in Particle Mesh update — a note from the CEO . There are consequencies to this which affects my company greatly, I will elaborate this in details below.
When investigating IOT platforms, mesh was one of the factors why we considered Particle. No other platform did this at all. We were right on board with the Gen3 launched and purchased multiple developer kits of all Argon, Borons (Both 3G and LTE-M) and Xenons. Although mesh “did not just work” functionality it was there and I had no problem setting up small networks of 5-10 devices. High availbility was a must for us in the beginning so we had hope that this feature will make it in eventually similar to the eventual deployment of NFC and BLE APIs which were not availble at launch or had some bugs. After 6-8 months of testing and prototyping with Particles and 2-3 other platforms we settled on Particle mid 2019.
The reason we chose particles over the other platforms were the following:
- Particle dashboard - Your quote “We’re doubling down on our most powerful features – over-the-air firmware updates and device diagnostics – and we’re working on new solutions specifically for mobility and asset tracking, which have become some of the most common use cases for Particle”. This is one of the TOP reasons. Good diagnostics, fleet management and reliable FOTA which accelerated product development by months.
- Support - We started off as a small quantity developer under the radar and support so far through the forms of via hello@particle.com were great. This was without paying anything aside from the developer kits.
- Particle Enterprise Benefits - Creating orgs, enterprise dashboard etc… are great along with commited, guarentee’s volumes and 24h turn around support. Enterprise support has been exellent so far.
- Architecture - As mentioned before, we compared particle to 2-3 other platforms and particle’s architecture stood out a lot. Your gen3 products are really something.
- Tools - Particle developer tools are surprisingly good. Visual code add on, particle-cli etc… are great and a actually miles ahead of other platform tools.
- Particle’s track record - Going with any 3rd party vendor comes depreciation risk. We considered particle discontinuing their products or support for “older” units. The electron and photon units have been supported for a few years and the updates still seem to be going strong for them. Given that Gen3 units just launched, we were expecting a long life cycle for these units. So this depreciation is really concerning for us. One saving grace is that , everything from your deviceOS, hardware schematics are all opened source which was very unique and cannot be said for all the other platforms.
- Mesh - You guys were the only one I can find support this feature and actually set the benchmark. This made you very unique. No matter how “bad” your mesh implementation was, there was actually no other “pre-made” alternative.
By “settling” on Particle, we’ve signed an enterprise contract for all 3 Gen3 skews and commited for quantities in the thousands. This followed by spending the last 6-8 months after signing designing products entirely AROUND the Gen3 particle platform. This includes custom PCBs, plastic covers/molds etc… which comes with significant costs easily 6 digits in dollars of R&D.
So the questions I have in mind and maybe anwsered on Thursday are as follows:
- Long term support of Gen3 products - Now that mesh is gone, there is less difference between the older gen particle models verses the new Gen3 units. A boron is simply a beef up electron and an Argon is a beef up Photon. From a business prespective now these 2 products seem to cannibalize each other more if it were me, eventually I assume one of the skews will have to go. What is Particle’s LONG term support plan for these product skews. I’m not only talking about the next 1-2 years but 4-5 years. The electron was launch in 2015, and given that the Gen3 units launched early 2019, I hope the Gen3’s supported life time is at LEAST just as long as it now. This is the “can we trust” part people are talking about. You mentioned it will take time to gain back trust but for people like me who are far down enough into a rabbit hole with particle, a longer term road map is much appreciated.
- Mesh as a 3rd party particle library - I know Particle is trying to do a “it just works” approach. But I also assume the large majority of Particle users are somewhat technical. While we would REALLY appreciate a “it just works” approach, some of us can do without this “Apple” approach and quality. Some of us do not mind configuring mesh and setting it up. If Particle decides that it’s resources is better put not supporting and developing mesh (+ all the reasons that mesh is NOT the right technology) thats fine, its a company decision with resource/financial balacing that was done. Nothing I say here will probably change this decision. But instead of completely killing the feature, some of us would appreciate it if mesh was perhaps bundled into a 3rd party particle library (+ documentation) and posted up somewhere before completely dusting this mesh feature completely off your table. The mesh feature was developed based on OpenThread which is opened source and great. A Particle user could probably do what you did, pull the SDKs, develope on it and get something working. But since you’ve already done all the heavy lifting (since 2017!), if you don’t want to deal with it anymore, at least just give it back to the open source community instead of burning it to the ground. I would (and maybe some others) would really appreciate this as a good gesture and a last gesture for a product that (as you’ve also mentioned) launched “with a bang” along with Cellular and WiFi making it SEEMED like a ready to go complete feature. You’ve already addressed as part of “how can I ever trust Particle again?”, mistakes happens and I am happy that Particle has admited to this fault and we now have a clear line between “beta” and general availbility features. But admiting a mistake is one thing and can be done with just words but action to try to reduce the damaged caused is more valuable. We esentially bough a product (and paid more for a Boron/Argon vs an Electron/Photon) with one of its core features now being removed from support. Just refunding the Xenon purchases only scratches the surface of the problem for those who bought Particles for mesh and greatly affects those who developed products around Particle for mesh. In summary, if you commited to supporting it and now you don’t want to, that sucks for all of us. It will take effort to decouple mesh from the device OS + cloud, but you guys already plan to do this after OS 1.6X. At least bundle this somewhat working feature with the documents you already have and hand it over. If Xenons are not being manfactured, Mesh can still happen between Argon’s and Borons that are.