Michael Arrington announced the death of the CrunchPad on Monday morning in a blog post heavily spiced with angst and drama.
According to Arrignton, the Cruchpad — a 12-inch Web tablet expected to be priced at about $300 — was just days away from launch. At the last minute, however, Arrington received an email from Chandra Rathakrishnan, the chief executive of manufacturing partner Fusion Garage, apparently trying to cut Arrington out of the product on the eve of the launch. Fusion Garage, according to Arrington, would market the device itself under its own name.
“Err, what?” Arrington wrote. “This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone,
notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving
ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from
Apple.”
Arrington claims that the company had overcome obstacles at every stage
in the business, securing preferred pricing for the Atom processor with
Intel, negotiating with a “major multi-billion-dollar retail partner”
for a retail launch and up-front payments, and securing venture capital and
angel investments to finance the company going forward.
“Mostly though I’m just sad,” Arrington wrote. “I never envisioned the CrunchPad as a huge
business. I just wanted a tablet computer that I could use to consume
the Internet while sitting on a couch. I’ve always pushed to open
source all or parts of the project. So this isn’t really about money.
It was about the thrill of building something with a team that had the
same vision. Now that’s going to be impossible.”
It's possible that the CrunchPad could still emerge in some form,
although Arrington has vowed to file multiple lawsuits against Fusion
Garage and its employees. For now, however, the CrunchPad will
inevitably take its place among the most heavily touted vaporware of 2009.
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