PeteGould
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United States
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I'm certainly not trying to defend DJI's decision process. I disagree with a central repair facility as much as you do. However I AM trying to provide a slightly different perspective. Apple in its early days had more than its share of warts, because while Steve Jobs had some great ideas and a lot of moxy he was just as controlling as anybody at DJI. And he was not hit by the kind of initial demand the Inspire apparently generated, so Apple had a chance to scale up just a bit less chaotically. It's hard to compare Apple, which has been around since the 1980s when relatively few people knew they would ever WANT a personal computer, with a company like DJI that struck a nerve in a much more tech-aware era, even leaving the cultural issues out of it.
Tahoe says DJI had a bad quality control experience with dealer repairs of the Phantom and centralized them because they were being beaten up by angry customers and supplying parts for repeated failed repairs of the same aircraft. While I would have responded by requiring repairer certification with required classroom training at DJI facilities (and making the process as strict as necessary), they decided to bring repairs in house. They further made the decision to make the Inspire cheaper/easier/quicker to assemble at the expense of making it less friendly to repair than the kit-based products (fewer screws / more glue / need for special alignment jigs). With an airborne device that can crash I think this was a mistake as well because the way not to be overrun in the repair department is to facilitate user repairs as well as local repairs, and just send out parts.
With that said, what I think happened was that Inspire sales far exceeded anything DJI ever imagined. They got so many orders that they couldn't make parts fast enough just to keep up with demand, never mind stock up on repair inventory. And they made the platform appear so easy to operate that people with zero experience snapped them up and then crashed them, overwhelming repairs while they were still struggling to make enough parts for manufacturing, and then overwhelming the repair facility with more incoming repairs (by orders of magnitude) than they had ever conceived of. And that's BEFORE you add in the actual product defects.
At that point it would have been too late even to rethink the regionalized repair idea if they wanted to, since the only people who could train those regional repairers were up to their eyeballs fixing broken Inspires.
So I don't quite agree that at this juncture we can say that DJI doesn't care about their customer base. They may or may not. We will be able to tell as they dig out of the current mess and make decisions moving forward. And it will not be instant because they've gotten themselves so overwhelmed.
I certainly don't disagree with your ultimate conclusion not to buy an Inspire unless you're comfortable with a six week repair turnaround. I likely would have gone a different way myself if I could have forecast all this when I preordered in November - heck, I even selected a retailer on the basis that they had a robust in-house repair facility. I also would have gone a different way had I realized the video encoding would be so overcompressed and that it would not be something they would quickly revisit and tweak. Such is the risk of preordering based on manufacturers' claims.
So ultimately we get to the same practical conclusion, just for slightly different reasons.
I do hope they ultimately redeem themselves, though, because there is enormous potential in that company to innovate, and the Inspire is ALMOST wonderful. I would hate to see them squander their potential due to some poor logistical decisions. |
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