(italicised emphasis mine. Reality check required? Nothing? Really?)
Looks like some people did not read the prefaces to all those promises about "forward looking statements" not being guaranteed!
Its amazing how much more difficult it is to actually deliver a fully functioning market-ready product than it is to just imagine how great it will be when all the conceptual components get put together. Just as with the Jetsons, novel ideas are easy to come up with, but real things always take much longer than envisaged - i.e. before you knew why something would be more difficult than supposed. Remember "Edison's incandescent light bulb"? It took thousands of experiments to find a material that actually did what the original idea envisaged. Fortunately Edison kept on trying them all hoping that would lead to finding one that did the business, and he was ultimately proven right. But what did he - and all his co-investors - think about all those previous failures, right up til the one before the one that worked?
I have no doubt that MJP has had quite a few surprises on its route to turning Glenn Martin's proof-of-concept prototype into an optimised, saleable, first-to-market product that people are willing to trust their lives to! Is that a sign of either incompetence or bad faith on the company's part? I don't think so. Failing to meet investors hopes and expectations, where these later prove to have not been sufficiently realistic, is not necessarily a sign of management's incompetence, nor is an invitation to invest into a speculative stock, when it is clearly stated that there are likely several unknowns and imponderables of ability or timing, evidence of deception or broken promises. You want to sail with the boat heading off to find fame and fortune? You hop on and you go where it takes you. Unless its a commercial service that you buy a ticket for, nothing is guaranteed.
FYI: A Brief History of the Light Bulb (http://www.bulbs.com/learning/history.aspx)
The electric light, one of the everyday conveniences that most affects our lives, was not “invented” in the traditional sense in 1879 by Thomas Alva Edison, although he could be said to have created the first commercially practical incandescent light. He was neither the first nor the only person trying to invent an incandescent light bulb. In fact, some historians claim there were over 20 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Edison’s version. However, Edison is often credited with the invention because his version was able to outstrip the earlier versions because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.
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In 1878, Thomas Edison began serious research into developing a practical incandescent lamp and on October 14, 1878, Edison filed his first patent application for "Improvement In Electric Lights". However, he continued to test several types of material for metal filaments to improve upon his original design and by Nov 4, 1879, he filed another U.S. patent for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected ... to platina contact wires." Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament including using "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways," it was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1200 hours. This discovery marked the beginning of commerically manufactured light bulbs and in 1880, Thomas Edison’s company, Edison Electric Light Company began marketing its new product.
