>Take money from 'community', develop using that and get famous, get enterprise funding, stop community project and return the 'community money'. Good idea.
Except they took the "develop" stage out of the equation, and most likely never planned to make a functioning product except for shipping prototype grade minis.
See, what they did is not much different than other Android "OS" spinoffs: take white box product, and put android with custom skin on it. All of that costs $200k at maximum in China, not $2m.
What made them different thought is that they pumped so much into keep hype going. And that tactic paid them off. Corporate M&A people in the People Republic of China are known to be easily impressionable, if not worse.
Except they took the "develop" stage out of the equation, and most likely never planned to make a functioning product except for shipping prototype grade minis.
See, what they did is not much different than other Android "OS" spinoffs: take white box product, and put android with custom skin on it. All of that costs $200k at maximum in China, not $2m.
What made them different thought is that they pumped so much into keep hype going. And that tactic paid them off. Corporate M&A people in the People Republic of China are known to be easily impressionable, if not worse.