Science fiction and technology writer

Posted on: 2020-04-09 17:21:47.000Creating and shipping a brand new product is insanely difficult. It takes a ton of money, sweat, and time. Even people with tons of experience can underestimate timelines and encounter unexpected difficulties. So telling the story of a failed Kickstarter is not especially interesting.This is not that story.This is a story about what happens when someone builds up a reputation over decades of work and then destroys it in a couple of years. Not because they failed, but because they lied about it. Over and over again. Until the lies got too much to handle, and they had to create newer, even larger lies to cover them up. Why would anyone do this? We'll get into that at the end. But first, the story.ACT ONERobert X. Cringely is a pseudonym of Mark Stephens, a long-time computer columnist and author. He was best known for his 1992 book Accidental Empires, which told the story of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in an entertaining way. In 1996, the book became a popular TV series on PBS and the UK's Channel 4 called Triumph of the Nerds. The show was, and is, an amazing piece of work. It featured interviews with many of the big players of the early personal computing landscape. Cringely portrayed himself as an affable nerd who was envious of the riches earned by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. At one point in the show he said he had briefly been Employee #12 at Apple, and helped move them out of Jobs' garage. He said he was offered Apple stock, but held out for cash.Over the next decade, Cringely built up an online column on the PBS website, and attracted many followers. He left PBS in 2008 and struck out on his own, writing columns about computer history, economics, and even aerospace on his own website, cringely.com. One thing that became a sort of personal trademark was that Cringely would post dramatic predictions about some new miracle technology that would soon take over the world. Some of them, like foil-based hard drives, were also ventures that Cringely was personally invested in. He even gave talks at tech conferences where he started with a claim that he invented the Trash Can icon and ended with a long pitch for the business. None of these ventures panned out. Not the foil hard drives, not the innovative electric airplanes, and certainly not the "Team Cringely" attempt to win the Lunar X-Prize by landing a robot on the moon (that one literally never got off the drawing board). It would be easy to dismiss these as mere flights of fancy, or as merely a tech journalist being overly-excited over new technology. Who can fault someone for enthusiasm?But everything changed on September 29, 2015. That's when Cringely announced the Mineserver project on Kickstarter.ACT TWOAt first, it seemed like a simple, fun activity that his three young kids (all Minecraft fanatics) could help out with. The project raised more than double its goal, with 388 total backers pledging a total of $35,452. The servers would be tiny, inexpensive ARM-based boards, slightly more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.Things moved quickly at the beginning. In the first month, Cringely posted pictures of the boards, the SD cards that would hold the open-source Minecraft server software, and the plastic shells etched by a laser cutter that would serve as the cases. On October 28, 2015, he posted: "In terms of development, this project was almost finished before the Kickstarter campaign began."There were a few minor setbacks. The laser cutter broke and had to be repaired. Software choices (like which server to include) were trickier than initially thought. On December 14, 2015, Cringely posted "All these Mineservers will ship this week. Software is complete and SD cards are being duplicated. T-shirts are being printed every night by small boys." The next week, he posted: "Denial plays a huge role in every startup. Sometimes it's a good thing. Again, we're sorry, but shipping will be delayed about one week." The next update was a month later."First, an apology," Cringely began. "We're sorry to have taken so long to post this update. We know people have been expecting their Mineservers and are upset with us. We'll be more transparent in future." Cringely posted a picture of some of the boards and said "You can see that's all done-- 425 units burned-in and ready to go. But we can't install the boards and put the lids on until the software is finalized."The next update was two months later, on March 17, 2016. "Sorry to have gone so long without an update," came the familiar refrain. “We won’t do THAT again.” But Cringely promised there was just one "final bug" to fix in the software and that they fully expected to ship next week. Cringely admitted that the project was "$7500 in the hole" but that it wasn't that much overhead to start a technology business.Another month went by. "This beta test will last no more than two weeks." was the promise. Another month passed. "There remains one final problem." Now we were into July. "Once we have the AIM update we will begin shipping within hours as all the Mineservers (more than 300 of them) have long been finished and are waiting only for their SD cards."August rolled around and the Kickstarter backers were still waiting. In September, Cringely said that their choice of Linux (Arch) wouldn't work with the WiFi adapters they had picked. They fixed that, but in October, they were "still a couple of weeks from shipping" because they needed to do more network testing. Finally, on November 10, 2016, more than a year after the project was expected to ship, Cringely wrote: "We'll finally start shipping the week after Thanksgiving. Thanks for your patience and support."Nothing was shipped, and there were no more updates posted to the Kickstarter project. Ever.ACT THREEIt wasn't the end of the story, however. On January 9, 2017, Cringely posted a bunch of predictions for 2017 on his blog. Someone immediately commented: "First on the list of FAILED predictions: Mineservers will ship for Christmas 2015". Cringely replied: "Touche. More on that in a few days." It wasn't a few days, though. It was a full four months before he would mention the topic again.On May 22, 2017, Cringely posted an update on his own blog with the subject line: "Mineserver update: We're not dead yet!" The post started off boldly, ignoring the six-month silence (and continuing Kickstarter silence) completely. "This is our 25th update on the Mineserver project. That's a lot of updates for people who don't do enough updates." Right off the bat, he was attacking the reader, claiming that they were being unfair about his pace of updates. Then things got weirder.Cringely admitted that the project had stalled because they were out of money. Sure, they had received $30,000 from Kickstarter after deduction of their fees, but the project itself had consumed $90,000 and there was no more cash in the Cringely barrel. So at that point, rather than admit defeat, he decided to reformulate the project as a proper startup, with lawyers and investors. The reason for the long silence was two-fold: one, that their delicate negotiations with investors had to be kept under wraps, and two, that they couldn't blame their suppliers in public. This last admission was odd: what would they be blaming their suppliers for, exactly? The answer was even stranger: they were waiting on suppliers who were giving 90 percent discounts, and therefore they could not criticize their slow delivery timeline. Except, by merely stating this, Cringely was criticizing their suppliers. Not to mention the fact that 90 percent discounts are completely unheard of in the electronics industry.But the post ended on a hopeful note. Cringely said he had set out to find investors and raise seed money, and "the pitch must have worked, because we've found just enough investors to move on to the next level, which is shipping our current orders."This happy conclusion, though, was not to be. Two months later, Cringely posted that he was suddenly blind from cataracts, but that he would have his sight restored in ten days, and maybe everyone could lay off asking about Mineserver updates until then. But there was only silence for another three months.That silence ended on October 13 2017. That's when Cringely posted the infamous shot of his house in Santa Rosa. Blurry and unfocused, the house was framed by an orange light. Cringely explained that he and his family had been forced to retreat, on very short notice, from the Tubbs fire.According to Cringely, he was still blind at the time, so therefore the family could take only one car, leaving the other one to burn. And, more importantly for the story, all the assembled Mineservers were left to burn as well.Surely that was the end of the tale! As a narrative, all it needed was a denouement. But that wasn't to come. ACT FOUROn January 2, 2018, Cringely proudly posted "A visionary returns", where he started off addressing what he referred to as "The Mineserver Jihad". At first it was just a recap of unfortunate events: the project depended on kids, who weren't reliable, then Cringely went blind, then the whole thing burned down. But rather than an apology, what followed was a confident prediction of success: "We're finally back at work, though, at Mineserver LLC, and will have a revised design ready to go shortly. Look for a spec update and new shipping schedule in a couple more weeks, followed shortly by a clever marketing announcement you may enjoy."At this point, you can probably guess what happened in two weeks. Nothing. Nothing happened for four more months.On May 21, 2018, Cringely addressed the Mineserver issue again. He claimed that the insurance company would take 16 more months to pay him anything for his home, and that it might not pay for the melted Mineservers at all. But yet again, the promise: "We're back in the Mineserver business, preparing a successor model because the available boards and other parts have all changed.