I remember when Apple mispriced their 1TB hard drives at $30 instead of $300 [1]. All orders were cancelled.
I'm a huge fan of Razer. I own many of their products and would recommend them all, especially the DeathAdder mouse. Seriously, it's quite possibly the best mouse you will ever use.
I didn't get anything ordered with a 90% reduction, but I think I'll be ordered an Orbweaver later today. They deserve it.
I have a DeathAdder. The mouse itself (the hardware) is great. However, the software (the thing that really makes the mouse functional and configurable, which is what i thought i was paying for) is one of the most absurd and infuriating things i have ever had to deal with.
The configuration tool was designed in the vein of Steam — it requires an Internet connection to use it. At all. So before you can change the mouse settings, before the mouse will even LOAD its settings, you must create a Razer account and sign in to their online service through the tool. Only then will you be able to do anything with the mouse.
Also like Steam, there is an option to 'go offline', but it (perhaps unintentionally) doesn't seem to persist across sessions. So if you lose your connection and then you reboot the computer or the tool crashes (which is semi-frequent), you're back to where you started — a log-in prompt.
In addition to that, just from a usability perspective, the software is a disaster. It is a mass of grey-on-grey text, modal panes, near-full-screen sliders, and unexplained icons that i dread even thinking about using. In addition, the tool adds an ugly menu-bar icon that you can't get rid of, and once you install the software you can never close it — if you try to kill the tool or any of its background services, the entire thing will respawn. And just to give you that extra punch in the face, every time the tool starts (at boot or because one of its background services crashed) the giant black-and-green blob pops up on top of everything else. HEY, HEY, LOG IN TO YOUR MOUSE NOW
The scroll wheel is also apparently non-configurable on OS X, which is incredible because the default behaviour is some pre-Windows-95 we've-just-invented-scroll-wheels one-pixel-per-rotation insanity.
Lastly, every single update to the software requires that you reboot the entire machine.
I am not exaggerating when i say that i loathe using this god-damn mouse.
> HEY, HEY, LOG IN TO YOUR MOUSE NOW
> Lastly, every single update to the software requires that you reboot the entire machine.
I only used the software once, a few years ago. I never logged into anything, it never required internet access, it never frequently updated and it never required a reboot.
You realise you don't need the software right? You can use the mouse perfectly without it. All the software lets you do is change the sensitivity (any good OS will let you do that), turn off the light, and program the "bottom" button. The light is under your hand 90% of the time and is off when your computer is off. It's a non-issue. The button the bottom is in an irritating position and I have never needed to use it. Sure, you could configure it to change sensitivity during a game (consider running and gunning vs. accurate sniping, perhaps?) but in reality no one is going to lift their mouse during an computer game to adjust the sensitivity.
> the default behaviour is some pre-Windows-95 we've-just-invented-scroll-wheels one-pixel-per-rotation insanity.
I have never experienced this problem. I don't know what you're talking about.
> I only used the software once, a few years ago. I never logged into anything, it never required internet access, it never frequently updated and it never required a reboot.
They changed the software package literally less than a week after i bought the DeathAdder. Previously there was a specific 'DeathAdder' utility which, as you said, didn't require any online junk. But they completely removed it from existence once their port of the Windows software left beta or whatever.
I did try installing a copy of it that i had saved from before, but it seems that the act of installing the new software somehow broke the ability to use the old one, and i didn't want to spend hours fucking with some mouse driver.
> You realise you don't need the software right? You can use the mouse perfectly without it.
No, you can't. Or i can't, anyway. The default tracking is unusable to me (i like it much slower and smoother-scaling than most people seem to), and OS X's tracking slider didn't help. The only way to make it even tolerable was to use the software. Additionally, the buttons would be recognised incorrectly unless you told the software what you wanted them to behave as.
> I have never experienced this problem. I don't know what you're talking about.
Obviously i was being facetious, i'm sure it was actually one line per 'click' or whatever. Each click had far too much travel for that to be usable. Especially in comparison to the Magic Mouse and Mighty Mouse, with which you can near-instantaneously flick to the bottom of a long Web page.
If you didn't experience that, i guess i don't know what to tell you.
I don't have a DeathAdder, but I have had really a lot of mice over the years whose software (especially on OS X, but really just in general) utterly sucks.
At least through 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8, and maybe going back longer than that, I've been using ControllerMate to program the functionality of all my mice (and some of my non-Apple keyboards). It's more of a general purpose visual programmer for input devices than a mouse driver, but works great for that limited use case.
It's a great help for the common case with mice of great hardware coupled with terrible software. I haven't installed third-party mouse software since I found it. Might be worth checking out. (Not affiliated, just find it useful...)
I got an Abyssus, it has all it's settings as hardware switches, so it doesn't require any software.
Most of the time installing mouse "drivers" for any vendor it's a waste of time, since the settings they provide should be adjusted in-game (default driver should give you a 1:1 sensitivity and 0 acceleration).
I have been using DeathAdders since 2009 (2, one broke after 3 years) and think they are amazing, hands down. Never bothered to install their software, as they work perfect for me without.
I have no issues with a company not honouring a mistake, but honouring one will definitely win my respect, and make me want to buy from them in the future.
theres also a clear difference in the size of both companies. For Razer as small company this is brilliant PR, probably better than most of their marketing campaigns, so money well spent.
Apple ? They probably couldnt care less.
I am not saying Razer only does this because they see their benefit, but they probably also dont only do it because they are nice people.
I've used the DeathAdder since my original IntelliMouse died (Probably about 5-6 years now) and it's been the perfect successor. Just the right size, weight, good movement, simple, etc.
Absolutely. I love the accuracy and feel of the mouse.
What mousemat are you using? I was using a Razer Goliathus[1] but switched to a BF3 Razer Scarab[2] my brother won at in an internal DICE raffle before BF3 came out. It is 100x better than the Goliathus and I would recommend a similar 'hard' mat if you don't have one already. Lots of space, very smooth, and very accurate.
They basically just ran a (very extreme) Groupon. Most companies that do daily deals lose money on them in hopes of turning some of those initial customers into recurring or lifetime customers or to increase awareness for their products.
This 'mishap' may have similar yet increased effects because of the impressive way they handled the situation. For example, I doubt Razer would have ever imagined their story landing on the frontpage of a high-traffic site like HN, but now that it has, I (and probably hundreds or thousands of others) have gone to their site to get more info.
Really shows that with smart and agile situation-response, you can turn an unpleasant circumstance into an opportunity.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Groupon customers do not return for additional purchases and the people who capitalize on these types of deals are 100% price-conscious vultures[1] (also, I used to be one of these people). At the end of the day, this was a very poor business decision and just a PR gamble.
People are primarily driven by price when they buy goods, so after 6 months or so people will forget this extremely generous act. Razer fans will remain razer fans, but unless Razer has a product leaps and bounds ahead of the competition (some are, but most are only marginally superior) very few will become loyal customers due to this act of kindness.
The thing that's a bit different about this is that most of these customers are NOT price-conscious vultures, they are enthusiasts. Otherwise, they would have said "Razer? Who the hell is that?" These products are not well known outside hardcore PC gamers. PC gamers are willing to drop a TON of cash on their hobby or else they wouldn't be hardcore PC gamers.
The longtime Razer fans to some degree seem to be canceling their orders. At least with the ones you'll be shipping still I'd think the majority of those are strong PC gaming enthusiasts who have friends who are as well. Their stuff is quite shiny and attractive in general.
I might buy a mouse because of the deal, and if the quality is as good as you say, I'll be back in the future for more. But as of now, mice are commodity to me--the coupon helps push me into trying out a "luxury mouse". It's risky but perhaps not ineffective customer acquisition.
In the grand scheme of things, however, this will be a lot cheaper than conventional advertising.
This is not a bad thing for anyone, as they are currently sponsoring e-sports in a "big" way, and have done so for well over a decade now. I may no longer use or appreciate their gear the way I used to, but they definitely stand by their demographic. Definitely an ace move in by Razer here, in every regard.
+1 agree completely, honestly its rare that a company honours glitchy orders, at least in my experience, so I'm quite shocked actually. I've been a Razer person for a while, and I haven't found anything else quite like it. What do you use, and why is it better?
The only Razer product I've been truly happy with was the Diamondback, which was nearly identical to the MX518 in terms of hardware. With a bit of driver hacking (really just substituting the vendor and hardware ID) you could run the MX518 with Razer drivers, which I did for a long time.
I used Razer products since the Boomslang (with its floppy button problem, which was a material flaw, not component related). Among others, I had a Nostromo and Lachesis.
The Nostromo was nice enough, but had some pretty strange glitches (it would at times switch profiles and just act really strangely). The hand-rest was coated in some rubbery thing which absolutely loved to attract any dirt and dust in the room, and ended up requiring very frequent cleaning.
As for the Lachesis, there was a HUGE component flaw in the sensor, which was partially remedied by a ton of driver updates, but never fully fixed in my case. The cursor would drift, be subject to negative acceleration or simply not respond at all. Definitely not the kind of thing you'd want for any kind of input, really.
What Logitech offers for me in this case is seemingly iterative hardware development, and great support. It's not flawless, it's not flashy, but it's safe and they have excellent customer service to make up for it. I'm no longer young enough to care for flashy gear. ;)
Lachesis uses Philips Twin Eye PLN 2031. This sensor have some z-axis issues. Anyway its minor problem in comparision with mx518, which have some serious angle snapping/prediction.
I don't really agree that this is a good way. 90% discount is obviously a mistake and it is more than their right to cancel those orders. I would fully understand that.
Processing those orders doesn't seems that fair to me. Same rare people get 90% (!) off, all others don't. And FCFS isn't a cool, really fair principle. It is often used, because it is easy to implement and doesn't require more information than just time.
Also I expect the rate of people who ordered just because it is cheap and have no real appropriation is pretty high on that discount. Not talking about people who just wanna resell it on eBay.
What else could they have done?
* Make a general discount (e.g. 10-30%) for all potential
shoppers for the next weeks.
* Spend the lost money for development
* Hire more people
* Donate it to charity
* Make a challenge in any fair way. Again, time and
reaction is a pretty unfair criterion.
* Sponsorship
* ...
Again, FCFS is some type of fairness, but I think a pretty bad one.
Also not sure if this is real marketing. Are their clients really that community based and speaking about such thing? Aren't more just angry because they hadn't the chance to use the opportunity?
Umm this really isn't some big "FCFS" business strategy. They never intended to "give some customers 90% discount for no reason." A glitch happened, some people got lucky, and they honored it. I think you're reading too much into it.
Check the next comment on that post, a guy cancelling his order and redoing it at full price. It really is a strong community of enthusiasts.
They basically just turned this into a huge experiment in price discrimination for those customers who genuinely feel bad for what happened.
Those customers who feel bad and were originally willing to pay the full price savings will likely cancel and reorder. Those customers who feel bad and genuinely could not pay the full price, will keep their discounted orders, and the company will get to keep those people as customers well into the future.
I'm curious how transparent they'll be with how many canceled their orders when the dust settles - would be a good case study for other companies in this boat who want to trust their customers to do the right thing for themselves.
Now you made me look it up. It's called Synapse 2 and when I bought (and subsequently returned) a Razer Naga Hex in September last year it was the only way to configure the mouse. Specifically, you needed it to configure the keyboard emulation keys for the thumb buttons. It did require a registration and login. The excuse for this was some "store your settings in The Cloud" bollocks which I had absolutely no use for - I just wanted to configure my fancy mouse.
You can find it at http://www.razerzone.com/synapse2 and the tech specs there state that "Valid e-mail, software download, license acceptance, and internet connection needed to activate full features and for software updates." For a bloody mouse driver.
Yup, if you want to get to the Razer specific settings you need to log in. I wanted to turn the led in the mouse off, since it heated my hand and was annoying. Login was required and the servers were down. Razer never again, even though an offline mode has now been added.
90% is definitely a huge loss. But like other users said this bug only applied to the UK store that does not sell Razer blade.
That said most of razer's customers are repeated purchasers and that honoring the orders is going to generate a lot of good will among its core customers. A very bold move though.
This is the first I've heard about this but a good response from the business. I noticed he said they can legally cancel all the orders - is that true? As far as I was aware the law (at least in the UK) is that if a product is advertised at a certain price, even if it's a mistake, the business has to provide it at that price to any customer who gets in before they fix the mistake with the only catch being that the business is only obliged to sell one unit of the item at the incorrect price if they realise there has been a mistake (just from what I've heard from people working in retail).
If it's an honest mistake, there's no requirement to sell it, and beyond that most email confirmations say something like this from Amazon:
This e-mail is only an acknowledgement of receipt of your order and your contract to purchase these items is not complete until we send you an e-mail notifying you that the items have been dispatched to you.
In Germany, for example, displayed prices are merely an invitation to make an offer (”I want to buy this!”) which van then be accepted or rejected by the seller. Only if the seller accepts a contract of sale actually comes into existence. By the way, if the seller accepts but changes the conditions (by, say, changing the price) a contract of sale also doesn't exist. The buyer then has another chance to accept or reject this new offer.
It's pretty common sense, actually. Oh, and this doesn't mean that sellers can display wrong prices on purpose. That would be misleading advertising. But if it's a mistake it's not a problem.
It it is an obvious failure, and a general 90% discount clearly is, contracts may be canceled at any time. Additionally, if you read the terms, online orders are often just a request and need to be approved by the other contract partner first. Since Germany and UK are both within EU, law may be quite equal. I think this is a pretty fair rule.
Good for them on following through, I'm sure it will bring repeat business. Maybe 6-7+ years ago I attempted to make multiple purchases through dell.com over several months. All 3 were killed because the website listed the wrong price. I remember once I bought something like a USB drive for $47.99 and the real price was suppose to be $49.99. None of the purchases were near 20% off much less 90% in this case. I've still never ordered from Dell and never will.
I don't think you can seriously believe that the Razer Blade being sold for $250 is "cost price."
But I'm sure they did a full calculation of the costs that they'd have to eat if they honor this mistake and thought it was worth it for the good PR it would create.
90% pretty certainly means they were selling them at a loss, but I would agree that it's probably not as huge a loss as a 90% discount would suggest. In the "enthusiast" branch of the market, I would guess that a margin of at least 50% should be pretty standard. A $250 mouse very certainly costs far less than $250 to produce, although you always have to factor in their other business cost - advertisement and design to establish an "enthusiast" branch might even exceed what they pay on manufacturing. (This is also why you see them do so many sponsorships - it's simply a very, very cheap way to get exposure.)
I would think that it's not impossible that this was planned.
1234 as a coupon code is even something that people might find by mistake, meaning you wouldn't even have to try hard to seed the rumor. Just put it into the system and know that somewhere in the future, you will get a huge PR without much effort (other than stopping it after a certain period of time and accepting some losses).
In the industry a hell of a lot of people think it was a marketing trick, not a mistake. I'm leaning that way too, based on my knowledge of people within Razer (though I should point out that while I know plenty of people there, I don't have any specific knowledge about this situation, just speculation).
To pull this off purposefully wouldn't even have to be too expensive, we have no way of knowing whether they are honouring thousands of orders or a couple of hundred. And regarding margins, a hell of a lot of the costs associated with a typical product sale come from distribution (the distributor takes a cut, the retailer/etailer takes a cut, plus MDF marketing costs), so this deal being through the Razer site will certainly help keep the losses down.
Also side note to jamornh: the Blade isn't available in the UK yet, so bad example - but your point still stands, 90% is definitely a loss.
Ah, I did not realize that the Blade is not yet available in the UK. Thanks for the correction.
If this was planned by Razer as a marketing trick then it is quite elaborate, although completely possible. There seems to be several hundred people on the comments who mentioned they made purchases and some would even cancel their order.
In order for this to be staged they would have to limit the number of times that the code could be used (allowable "loss" budget? max number of uses?) and then pretend to realize the mistake and take the site down at the right time (maybe when the "loss" reached a certain amount.) I guess it isn't completely inconceivable... but if that's the case, well-played Razer.
I'm not sure it's really that complex, in their statement they've announced they will honour one purchase per person, not bulk buys, and it's quite easy to limit how many people make purchases either by manually watching it, or even with a little bit of code to kill it after X sales. Regardless, I either respect Razer for their pro-customer decision, or for their marketing idea, either way.
(And I don't think the Blade will ever be available outside North America. It's an irrelevant product that they created as a marketing gimmick.)
I'm almost certain that the UK store was the only store affected, and the UK store doesn't have the Blade for sale. On the stuff they sell, I imagine that 90% off isn't that far away from their costs.
I'm a huge fan of Razer. I own many of their products and would recommend them all, especially the DeathAdder mouse. Seriously, it's quite possibly the best mouse you will ever use.
I didn't get anything ordered with a 90% reduction, but I think I'll be ordered an Orbweaver later today. They deserve it.
1: http://www.digital-forums.com/showthread.php/307773-Misprice...
edit: Spelling, and added the only source I could find.