@ pankkake - yes I did read all the pages, ASICMINER started as a mining company and there are 100s of pages with people being obsessed with the hashrate. Only when it fell into irrelevancy did you start conveniently calling it "meaningless", but it is in fact not meaningless. Expanding to hardware is ok - when it makes sense. Gen 1 made sense because a large number of factors came together at the same time.

BFL and all the other competitors failed - there was no one to compete with. It was still the "gold rush" period for bitcoin - difficulty was still believably low and individuals were buying miners. Old technology was still relevant - let's not forget that Friedcat was basically selling a few chips using 10-year old technology for the price of a decent used car.

Now everything has changed, but for some reason no one realizes this. There are a ton of viable competitors who have actually overtaken ASICMINER and shipped better, faster hardware. ASICMINER is now the one playing catch-up. It is not the gold rush anymore; it is easier for individuals and individual newcomers to see that mining is hardly profitable, hardware becomes obsolete within a month and barely buys back it's buying price if lucky, and all of this will be doubly true come March, when the difficulty will be immense. Friedcat can no longer sell old chips - he must use more modern silicon, which means more manufacturing difficulties, higher costs, and lower margins.

I know all of you want it to go back to 5, I do too, since I put a lot of money into the company. But it's time to stop being delusional and use logic - ASICMINER is not the king anymore, and will likely never be.