The HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Microsoft HoloLens all opened for pre-orders in 2016 with plans to ship in early April (or late March in the case of the Oculus). All have run into fulfillment problems creating general confusion for their most ardent fans.
I won’t try to go into all the details of what each company originally promised and then what each company has done to explain their delays. I honestly barely understand it. Oculus says there were component shortages and is contacting people through email to update them. Oculus also refunded some shipping costs for some purchasers as compensation. HTC had issues with their day one ordering process and is using its blog for updates. Microsoft hasn’t acknowledged a problem but is using its developer forum to clarify the shipping timeline.
Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that spinning up production for expensive devices in relatively small batches is really, really hard. Early promises from 2015 followed by CES in January 2016 and then GDC in March probably created an artificial timeline that was difficult to hit.
On top of this, internal corporate pressure has probably also driven each product group to hype to the point that it is difficult to meet production goals. HTC probably has the most experience with international production lines for high tech gear and even they stumbled a bit.
Maybe it’s also time to stop blaming each of these companies as they reach out for the future. All that’s happened is that some early adopters aren’t getting to be as early as they want to be (including me, admittedly).
As William Gibson said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”