They definitely backtracked:
2,000 Mercury on stock. Wow. This looks bad to me. You can say they are "listening to the market", but its clear to me that if they had enough orders for Jupiter + Saturn they wouldn't do the additional work required to develop and sell a different, smaller unit, opening the preorders for it in a record time.
IMO, this only means they didn't get enough orders of the previous units. This is starting to look bad.
I really don't agree with this analysis at all. This is still an upper market unit, when you compare it to the 5gh/s BFL miner at $275 or the 335Mh/s AM USBminer at $100.
It's not much different from Saturn, just 1 chip instead of 2. It's a way for them to capture more revenue and realistically, they need to do that between now and October since we all know that the profit will have to go down as the network hashrate increases and the perceived ROI for a product takes more and more time.
I don't see this as a good thing or a bad thing - just business. If people want to order them, so be it.
My only concern is that I want items to go out in order - I don't care if Mercury equipment is available to ship on day 1. I want all products to go out in the order that we placed our orders. I'm confident that they won't make the mistakes that BFL did when they shipped 2 months worth of Jalapenos at the expense of orders for MiniRigs and Singles.
It wasn't about more revenue, it was about what people truly wanted with respect to price entry point vs. ability to scale customer service.
As the units are modular, they won't be replicating the Jalepeno, Mini Rig debacle. It will be shipped as and when orders were made. Fairly.