A despondent Michael Arrington has written a rather lengthy obituary mourning the death of the stillborn CrunchPad.
The enigmatic device was apparently just weeks away from its official launch before Arrington received the bad news that every inventor dreads.
“Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people ‘got it’ without any instructions,” claimed Arrington.
“Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want.”
But some things are just not meant to be.
Indeed, according to Arrington, the entire project had “self destructed” over “nothing more” than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.
“On November 17, the CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject ‘no good news.’ Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.”
However, Arrington noted that TechCrunch jointly owned the CrunchPad product intellectual property and was the sole owner of the CrunchPad trademark.
“So it’s legally impossible for them to simply build and sell the device without our agreement,” wrote Arrington. “It’s a sad day at TechCrunch HQ. Hitting the publish button on this post, which makes all of this so final..is a very hard thing to do. I’m enraged, embarrassed, and just sad. The CrunchPad is now in the DeadPool.”
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