Yesterday morning like a lot of people I was ready to buy an NVIDIA GTX 3080 graphics card when they went on sale. Worldwide demand was fierce and this roll out was not managed very well. Over the last 20 years the only company that purposefully does this type of scarce supply launch is Nintendo and that is a poor model to follow. If the market shifts, then you missed the window. Trickling out supply is a questionable strategy to maximize benefit. It really just prevents loss from unsold inventory. Instead of doing the right thing on this one and just having a pre-order method setup and either billing people at the time of shipping or charging the early adopters upfront the team over at NVIDIA online simply opened sales with a move to cart method and things devolved very quickly from that point. You can still hear the collective groan from a worldwide audience by reading the reactions from disappointed people worldwide.
Obviously, based on the previous prose you can tell that my experience was not good. I could see the webpage change from the standard presale page to the for sale page. That part seemed to go ok and then everything was sold out. I really don’t understand why they did not just take pre-orders and ship them to people in the order in which they were sold. Maybe they are trying to divert the bulk of the sales revenue to 2021 or they are trying to clear out the stock of older models and are allowing the current generation of cards to have a very scarce supply. Either explanation is infuriating as a customer. Just to be clear for the NVIDIA team the super infuriating part is that I could not even get in line to complete my purchase with a preorder. I have not even started the buying process. I got locked out from even being able to start the purchasing process and will have to try again or face the reality of horrible secondary market prices.
