1. They've got a buggy 1.0 application with no users.

2. They've got $41 million dollars in VC money.

Either by itself might be understandable, but the combination is worrisome.

For example, it's one thing if some angel investors invest $500K or $2 million in strong team with a half-baked idea. That's enough money to allow some hiring and a few experiments.

Or coming from the other side, I can understand why investors might put $41 million into a promising social network with dedicated users and strong growth.

But $41 million for a company which hasn't demonstrated product-market fit, and is still working the bugs out of their 1.0 release? I'm not sure what Sequoia thinks they see in this deal.

No, that is wrong.

My 1.0 apps don't crash (as per itunesconnect which says "No Crash Reports" for my last 3 iPhone/iPad apps which are all on their 1.0 version).

One of them was recently ranked #1 on Apple's top charts for its category. So this isn't a matter of trivial apps with a low user base.

iTunes Connect relies on people syncing their phone. Which doesn't happen nearly as often as you think. You should use something like PLCrashReporter[1] if you want accurate crash reports.

1. http://code.google.com/p/plcrashreporter/

There should have been quite a few, too, since we were the #1 iPad app for a while so I expect every crash report to mean 10x that many users actually experienced the crash.

i blame phone on-screen keyboards. Give me back my clickety keys!

There's a reason that as of this writing, the android market has color rated at 1.5 stars.

The current app on the android market could be written in 3 hour by someone who's never written an android app before. I just need to get a page to load 1/10 tries and have the app crash out the other 9.

Apparently 1.0 is the new beta

The result is that I just avoid apps that require it.

Color would have been much better served by a "Give us your email address" page like http://lifepath.me/ to drum up excitement.

Thoughts anyone?

I can't see enough of a first-mover advantage here to justify such a big bet. - But perhaps they have something awesome up their sleeve that we don't know about yet?

I don't even know what "elastic network" is supposed to mean, but yes, they better have a lot of that, for $41M...

They will always use stuff like this. And funny thing abou teenagers - there are brand new ones being made by the millions every single year....

It's the Toys'r'us business model. Your customer base is brand new every single year.

Only once have I experienced a full crash on android. The phone simply rebooted. No idea why.

I have never used OSX or windows after XP, so I can't say anything about them.

This was the original claim that you responded to. "by making the phone so unresponsive that a watchdog kicks in, or by using so much RAM that the OOM killer goes to town."

Crashes obviously happen on linux systems all the time. That's why this exists http://linux.die.net/man/8/watchdog and why we have reports like this http://www.unix.com/aix/106921-process-crashing-aix-due-memo... and this http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6059 etc. Are you claiming that such a situation can't arise on linux.

The same is obviously true on Windows and OSX.

Pivoting the conversation isn't the best way to make your point.

edit - Not to mention you attempt to use anecdotal evidence to support a general claim. Such has no place here.

I was actually replying to jbrennan who said "If it's possible for an application to bring down the system that sounds like the system was poorly designed." and burrows who said "And... you've essentially discredited windows, linux, and os x.". I didn't notice what ootachi said until you pointed it out. I consider "bring down the system" to main exactly that, kernel halt or panic.

The links you provided where about processes crashing and/or processes with memory leaks, which I could in no way consider to be "bringing down the system" (unless it's a very poor system where such things actually do bring down the whole system), and it would be completely insane of me to claim that processes cannot crash on nix.

My point was simply that kernel panics or anything that "brings down the system" very rarely occur, and normally occur due to hardware errors on nix systems, and as far as I know on newer Windows systems as well (again, never used OSX so I have nothing to go on there).

Simply put: When jbrennan said "bring down the system" that, to me at least, means anything that the _only_ recovery from is a reboot of the system, no more, no less, and that is what I was responding to.

I think the right assumption is that "they have so much faith in the team."

Chief Scientist @ LinkedIn, Founder of Lala, Founder of BillShrink, etc

OP, cool it down with the link bait headlines. It seems like fashionable to bad mouth Color right now with their monster financing, etc, but if you have ever built anything (and it looks like you have) you know damn well how hard it is.

And V 1.0, 40 million or not, always stinks and If it doesn't you shipped to late.

So, let's give this guys some time so we can understand why Sequoia gave so much money to Color.

Whatever happened to beta releases?