Hello everyone,
As you know, 3DR released Solo nearly a year ago and since then has been firmly focused on extending its capabilities. While many of our legacy products, including IRIS+ and X8+, continue to serve customers well, their time in the 3DR store has come to an end.
At the end of January, we will officially sunset most of our legacy products; they will no longer be available for purchase from 3DR. As such, I invite you to visit our store today for your last orders of IRIS+, X8+ accessories, FPV equipment, cables and more!
After the end of January, we will continue to sell products in the Solo and Pixhawk families. We will also offer a small selection of IRIS+ accessories and consumables (batteries, propellers, and so forth) through the end of March. And, of course, we will continue to offer the same excellent customer and technical support (including replacement components) for our legacy products.
Thanks to you all for your constant support of 3DR. We continue to work to bring you the best drone experiences in the world and to enable you to get the shot every time.
Best wishes,
3DR
Comments
Ah. That thread was back in August of last year. The support technicians may not have been trained on Tower back then, but it's fully supported now.
"Hi Derrick,
Thank you for contacting 3D Robotics Technical Support, hope you are having a great day!
Unfortunately we do not recommend the use of Tower App for Solo, this app is only for advanced users, we recommend to use the Solo App, please post your questions on the following link to see if other user can help you.
3DR pilot forums:
http://www.3drpilots.com/threads/tower-app-use-for-solo.1072/"
I will see if I can find some info on your preview. Thank you.
Mario: We totally support Tower and indeed I use it every day with Solo. Perhaps a customer support agent was mistaken?
There will indeed be a very complete and polished 3DR Commercial app (and accompanying cloud service and SaaS partnership) coming in March from 3DR. We showed a preview of it at Autodesk University in December.
@Chris
You stated "Consumer is where the market is at the moment, due to regulation, but we've always been focused on Commercial use at the ultimate goal.".
We have a 333 that includes the Solo, which is currently set up to be our primary UAS. Since our focus isn't on basic photography or videography, much of the functionality we need is in Tower, which 3DR will not support.
My first contact with 3DR support was very negative, solely because I mentioned that I used tower to try to determine if a problem was stemming from the Solo app itself, or somewhere else. My next contact went better, but the overall lack of support for commercial operations has the potential to be the one thing that drives me away from 3DR in the future.
Can you elaborate on how you plan to support commercial operations in the future, and if 3DR will release an app similar to tower, which is supported?
It would be a lot easier to find what's actually for sale, if all the 'out of stock' items in clearance would go away, and you could filter by platform.
I don't mind the fact that 3DR is "growing up" and changing it's business model in order to keep pace with the demand and economics associated with scale-ability, I just think that if you want consumers to invest $1000+ in something you sell then you need to provide them with parts support for a specified period of time moving forward.
If DIY products isn't where 3DR is headed, and Y6B's, X8's, and Iris+ are going the way of the dinosaur fine, but don't leave your already loyal base out to dry. Does 3DR not want repeat business?
I don't think it's that unreasonable to want the comfort of knowing that your investment can be kept operating for at least 2-3 years.
Discontinue the sale of the kit or assembled RTF vehicle first, then announce end of life, finally discontinue parts 2-3 years after the kit/arf was discontinued. To me that would be a responsible/respectful way to support your customers.
@Chris,
You are doing what IBM should have done before getting in a major crisis. Here's what Forbes wrote about it years ago:
Sometimes companies must fully transform their portfolios. Companies in a crisis need to look at their entire portfolios, rationally and candidly, and figure out what they have that customers want today and what customers will want tomorrow. Then get rid of anything that does not fit the resulting model, and invest in the growth opportunities.
In our case, the information technology industry was rapidly becoming commoditized, and we determined that we needed to shift our portfolio to a more balanced mix of high-value offerings. That meant growing our services and software businesses, both through internal investments and through acquisitions.
It also meant divesting low-growth, low-margin product lines and technologies like memory chips, technology components, printers, displays and personal computers. This was easier said than done, as those were technologies, products and even whole markets that we had invented and developed.
I bolded the last phrase, guess it does ring in your head.. Keep on doing what you do best INNOVATION !!
Chris;
Thank you for the reply. I guess the human resource side is very costly. It's not the end of the world although a lot of people don't like change. The community will adapt and all will be good.
Regards,
David R. Boulanger
David. It really is that unprofitable. Unlike the cloners, we have a 24/7 customer support and regulatory compliance, to say nothing of the need to generate margins that allow us to continue to support the open source dev teams. DIY products just don't provide those kinds of margins anymore, although prosumer/commercial products do.
Paul, because it makes imminent sense to retain a stable, reliable, and robust industrial/commercial grade processor that is managing the "not falling out of the sky" parts of the system, while employing those cheap and cheerful consumer grade processors for the upper level programming stuff.
Consider that some sort of microcontroller or other device is necessary to output PWM anyway, since the cell-phone chips are not designed to drive those sorts of signals natively. I ask why not keep the STM32F4 running the show? Why head off down a path, encouraging programmers not familiar with the needs of flight control, to start hacking on the same CPU that is keeping the thing in the air?
Now, the PH2 might not be the be-all-end-all. Pixhawk-like designs can be combined with SBC's in many ways. Making Pixhawkish modules (which is what the PH2 really is) makes it really easy to combine any SBC you want onto a vehicle. From what I can see, there's only one reason not want to sell them.
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