Hi @tony-white,
Can you give us any idea when the 4” polycarbonate domes will hit the store?
I have domes on each end of my AUV and will change them over as soon as the polycarbonate version becomes available.
Sales-related questions are best directed to our sales email (sales@bluerobotics.com) 
Sure thing Eliot, but there might also be some interest to the larger community rather than just me asking sales. Its a balance
Our general approach to product release dates and other sales-related information is to avoid public guidance until the official public release (aside from occasional hints that something is in the works). That helps us to avoid setting expectations that we inevitably will occasionally fail to meet (e.g. due to unexpected developments, or changing priorities).
You’re of course welcome to ask questions, and the community can ponder and discuss, but the most reliable way to get up-to-date sales information from Blue Robotics is currently through our official sales channel, which is our sales email address (sales@bluerobotics.com)
I would personally love it if we could share detailed public roadmaps for all our projects (hopes and dreams included), but the desires (and timeline conjectures 
) of individuals aren’t always practical for a business to broadcast, especially when others in the community may stake their projects and/or businesses on that uncertain information.
I am curious what value you expect to get from finding out a release date like this in advance, and whether you think there’s some effective way for us to communicate (often incomplete) information without creating unreasonable expectations or self-defeating prophecy
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Hi Eliot,
I hear your reservations and apologise if my comment seem curt. I emailed the question to sales shortly after.
I wasn’t trying to find out a release date in advance of it being official. I was just trying to find out a release date, and if @tony-white already knew that, even roughly, it would have been in continuity with the original thread. Sorry Tony, if that was inappropriate.
I’m particularly interested in this part. We have previously discussed the 4” dome, when I asked about plans to increase the depth rating to bring it in line with the 4” pressure tubes https://discuss.bluerobotics.com/t/any-plans-for-950m-4-domes/13500. While it would be nice to have the thicker part, I’ll still happily take the extra toughness of the polycarbonate. I will order them the day they become available because they address a concern in my AUV.
It is great that the store already has little labels that say “we have a change on the way”. I appreciate that this creates a potential where the older stock is left unsold, and that while the labels help customers make decisions, they don’t necessarily help BR manage stock levels. I am grateful to @Pierre021 for starting the (original) thread because I hadn’t looked at the store in a while and didn’t know that this change was coming.
This preamble is to get back to your final question about an effective way to communicate upcoming changes, and this is no longer just about domes. You might need to change the thread name again I while ago I got caught up in BR’s plans (I think it was a Kickstarter) to introduce a thruster with the ESC included, which I thought was a terrific idea in terms of managing heat dissipation but a bit of a PITA as far as the cabling went. Eventually the idea was shelved and my preorder was converted into usual thrusters and ESCs. And I was absolutely OK with that because I understood that it was not an established product.
I think (IMHO) that announcing that potential changes are coming on the forum would be useful. The announcements can be wrapped in caveats about not promising that it will be just like that, or even get all the way to market. Or it might be “hey, if we did this, would anybody use it?”
I read the forum posts all the time, but I don’t go polling the store for updates. Just knowing what parts might change will inform how I design systems that are still 12 months away. The other thing that might come out of posting potential changes is feedback from the community that could improve your products before you get too committed to actual production. There are a lot of clever people on your forum who have plenty of ideas they’re happy to give away. You might also get a backlash of conflicting opinions that don’t help one way or the other, but BR can ignore those.
I don’t know how you balance that against running the risk of your IP bleeding away before your can properly occupy the market. This is probably a bigger risk for completely new products rather than iterative improvements, but it’s still a concern. I’m just saying that I recognise that it’s a consideration too.
Anyway, that’s very long winded. I’d better stop there.
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Thanks for the well-considered response
Not everyone is as understanding, but I suppose that’s also partly on us to effectively communicate levels of certainty. A Kickstarter is one way of saying “we’re trying to make this, but it might not work”, but as a now established business we typically prefer not to front-load our new product development costs with preorders, in favour of having more control over the when and how a product is released without the attached external investment (and potential Osbourne effect on our existing products, as you’ve mentioned).
This seems reasonable to me, although doing it well would require a fair amount of thought (and possibly a not insignificant amount of work). I think the current approach (notice on the store page) is primarily useful for avoiding buyers remorse if a new/improved variant drops very soon after a purchase.
Making individual posts for upcoming changes seems potentially excessive unless we actively want community input to be part of a specific change. In this case the product update made sense for various reasons, and is now close enough to implementation that we thought it relevant to give purchasers some forewarning in case the difference is important to them. There wasn’t anything we specifically wanted input on, because it’s already near the end of the pipeline.
That being said, I recognise your broader concern that keeping track of our product updates is not necessarily straightforward for the community, and I believe similar ideas have been raised before by others. Perhaps we could have an ongoing “product updates summary” thread (and one for software?), with monthly or quarterly updates simply listing new products and variants, and including the same news about upcoming changes that we currently include on our product pages. That could then invite discussion for things people care about, but without us needing to create a dedicated thread to discuss each change that occurs.
We do this from time to time with the poll tag, although often our earliest user consultation and feedback is done less publicly, outside of ideas being suggested/requested by the community (e.g. in the forum, through social media, or the form in our help desk), and/or relevant mentions in discussions about other things.
Yeah - that does factor at least somewhat into when and how publicly information about upcoming products is shared. Not every idea is at risk of that, but some are, especially if they’re very novel approaches to something, or are focused around unfamiliar manufacturing processes that might take us a while to develop expertise in using.