Personally, I believe that the lack of forums on the pleoworld site is extremely telling, coupled with the lack of response from customer support when emails are sent to Ugobe asking what is going on.
If you're in trouble as a company, the last thing you want to do is appear so to the outside world, particularly if you have made promises of updates for your product that have been a big selling point (I mean, most of us bought the Pleo anticipating a continuing development of Life OS for a while at least, right ? I know I did) - but in this case, Ugobe probably can't help us getting a sniff of something fishy.
So what I would do if I were them under the circumstances is - maintain the website so I can continue to sell a product (and keep as much revenue as I could, in hopes that it will keep me going), but disable any official user forums so people can't talk about how little response they're getting from the company.
Obviously, Ugobe can't stop anyone else from setting up a new forum such as this - but on their website, if you were a new Pleo owner who had questions after buying Pleo, you'd think something was wrong if you emailed them and got little or no response - so you'd go to the Ugobe user forums to ask why there's no response. Then people researching Pleo on the official site would see that there's a bunch of people saying there's no response from customer support and maybe not buy a Pleo as a result. Which becomes a self fulfilling prophecy as mentioned further up the thread.
This is a very simplified scenario obviously but basically true none the less.
As has also been said - companies don't tell their customer base when they're about to go down the pan so I don't think we can expect any news from Ugobe in the vein of "we're circling the drain, bear with us !" Half the time even the staff don't know it's on the cards until it happens !
Something is plainly wrong - if things were all hunky dorey over at Ugobe, someone would have put a "Normal service will be resumed" notice on the forum url page. Instead we have a "this page doesn't exist" error. Even if they had lost the forum contents in the move (unlikely in my opinion, having maintained my own rather smaller website for eight or so years, but possible), they could just as easily set up a brand new one and apologise for the loss.
As for manpower issues being at fault -- A similar sort of thing happened with another product I bought last year - an e-reader from a company called Irex. They had one model - the iLiad (two flavours of, one with wifi one without), which they were selling and then without warning (well, to most - I knew about it but I was privvy to the info) they brought out a new one (the digital Reader series, bigger brighter better) and dropped support and updates for the iLiad, although they are still selling it. But what they did was very honourably release the source code for the OS the the public, so that the community of owners could develop it themselves. People shouted like mad that they company had left them in the lurch, but at least there is some hope of a user supported project to maintain and update the OS.
I think this might be the best we can hope for from Ugobe if they don't have the manpower to continue to support Pleo.
And if they've gone down the pan totally well, let's hope for the same.
Whatever is going on over there, it smells more fishy than Baldrick's apple crumble (to quote Blackadder !)
...My two pennies worth.
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Topic: UGOBE not talking anymore! (Read 12107 times)