Ah, the Poly. For those who don't know, Poly is a WiFi streaming receiver that attaches to the side of the Mojo. It is priced at around $750 (much more than the Mojo itself). The combination adds up to over $1200.
Poly was such a disaster at launch that I followed the Poly thread on Head-Fi for months. It was like watching a train wreck in progress and I couldn't look away. Here are just a few (of many) entertaining tidbits:
- A lot of customers had trouble getting the Poly to work, and John Franks (head of Chord at the time) would go on the thread and argue with customers and blame them for having "bad WiFi networks". Franks would keep saying that Chord knows more about networking than anybody else and it can't be Chord's problem. Nevermind that many of the customers were tech savvy and all their other WiFi devices worked fine. One was a network specialist and posted trace logs proving that the Poly kept disconnecting. Eventually Franks stopped posting and a tech liaison stepped in who was much more sympathetic to customer concerns.
- It was discovered that the Poly could not connect to a WiFi if the SSID had spaces or special characters. Chord's initial response was to tell customers to change their WiFi SSID.
- The Poly has no power or reset switch. When it froze or hung (not an uncommon occurrence), the only remedy is to let it run out of power (takes about a day) then recharge and restart it. Oh, and customers also had problems getting the Poly to charge up.
When I stopped following the Poly thread after about 6 months, there were still many serious problems. I see that the Poly thread on Head-Fi is now approaching 17,000 posts, almost all of it from users discussing problems. I had been surprised that Chord didn't at least temporarily halt sales until it was in better shape. What kept the product alive was the loyalty of the Chord fanbase ("it's from Chord so it must be good") and their willingness to look past obvious problems. Some customers did give up, and the Poly has hurt Chord's reputation. To Chord's credit they kept working on resolving issues one by one (but the product is deeply flawed and it's a bottomless pit). Most companies would have cut their losses and moved on.
www.head-fi.org
