CrunchPad Goes “Bye Bye”

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reveals the story behind CrunchPad and the reason why it all ended, after a long struggle. A 1.5 year effort went down the drain, just as two weeks ago we found out that the CrunchPad was ready for official take off. The device was quite stable actually, it didn’t crash and it was even ready for Chrome OS and Windows 7 action. However, things went bad…

The plan was to launch the CrunchPad on stage on November 20 and put 1,000 devices for pre-sale immediately, with orders available right away and mass production scheduled for 2010. Michael Arrington blames the failure of the project on “greed, jealousy and miscommunication”.

In simple words, the CEO of the partner of this project, Chandra Rathakrishnan let Arrington know in an email that updated hardware was on the way, a timing issue had surfaced and the folks of TechCrunch were no longer involved in the initiative. This is quite bizarre, considering that it was TechCrunch’s idea behind it, but Chandra mentioned pressure from shareholders and the intention to move the device through Fusion Garage.

After a series of talks, it was decided that the launch can’t move on, since Arrington and co own the intellectual property for the device together with Fusion Garage, so the latter can’t launch the tablet without the approval of the people who spawned the original idea.

Michael Arrington ends his sad post on the matter claiming that partnerships with Intel and a bunch of Chinese companies and investors almost managed to make them launch a $300ish device, but he regrets that it all ended so sadly.

[via techcrunch]