Comments on: How Not To Go Out Of Business

By: Timothy

Timothy — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:08:15 +0000

Wow! That’s a mouthful reading this.

I actually just bought one from Micro Center yesterday night. So I guess my question now is: Is it worth keeping something that you can’t support for?

I still am in the middle of getting it setup, but what can I do / what can’t I do now that the company is gone?

Too bad they didn’t open up this appliance as opensource for the community to work with.

By: Matt Wilkinson

Matt Wilkinson — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:14:28 +0000

Funny follow up to this post… a former employee of Chilisystems, who happened to be an avid Lockergnome reader, saw my article about the demise of the company. He just gave me a call, and I remembered working with him a couple years back when I first installed the Chilibox at the customer site. Being a small startup, it was easy to access their support and speak directly with people who were heavily involved with the product’s development. So nice compared to large, impersonal companies, where your call often is routed to somebody who has never had any hands-on experience with the product you are calling about.

We chatted about what happened with Chilisystems, confirming my theory that they just couldn’t generate enough sales… but they also couldn’t generate enough interest at the investor level, either.

But, to set the record straight, the Chilibox was based on FreeBSD, not Linux.

By: Matt Wilkinson

Matt Wilkinson — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:45:09 +0000

Oh, and another thing… you would have that 8080 Interactive would have taken over or forwarded the domain Chilisystems.com to their site. I do NOT trust any company that takes over a product line from another company, and doesn’t do this. It’s Internet Marketing 101 stuff.

By: Matt Wilkinson

Matt Wilkinson — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:24:15 +0000

Thanks Daniel — at least now I know what happened to them. Looks like they some interesting hardware ideas, but I will stay away from them given what happened with the original Chilibox.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:16:54 +0000

You and I are in pretty much the same boat. I’m trying to find a replacement for a Chilibox as well.
It looks like ChiliSysterms was bought out/taken over by a company called 8080 Interactive
http://www.8080interactive.com/
The e-mail I received from them states:

As of August 25th the current line of Chili Box products will no longer be supported by 8080interactive or Chili Systems. If support is required it can still be provided by at regular hourly rates from the current support team.

On September 1, 2008, 8080interactive will introduce the new line of Chili Box products. These products will have increased capabilities and functionality and target all areas of home media and home entertainment as well as many areas of office networking and functionality. If there is an interest in working with us to build a distribution base and increased customer base we would like to hear from you. We can provide you with documentation on the new boxes, their functionality and the target market. But, in a nut-shell we will be building:

1. The Chili Digital Home in a Box (250, 500, 750GB)
2. The Chili Home Media Server (500, 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB)
3. The Chili Windows Home Media Server (750GB, 1TB)
4. The Chili Desktop (1TB)
5. The Chili Mini (80GB)
6. The Chili Laptop (120GB, 240GB)
7. The Chili Small Business Sever (1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB)
8. The Chili Storage Server (1U, 2U, 4U, 5U with up to 16 hard drive bays)
9. The Chili Streaming Media Server (4U, 5U – 12 and 16 drive bays with 15K hard drives)
10. The Chili Cable Box

Time to move on…as soon as I can find a good replacement firewall/router that had a marketable price point I’ll be all set.

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