Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

blog.adafruit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 175 posts

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#81

Post by lakala6790 »

ipsum2 wrote: post #60
ChuckMcM wrote: post #55

This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?…

> like Adafruit, but even there the margins are tight and the operations are small I'm surprised, Adafruit has a 50-100% markup on most items compared to Aliexpress/other Chinese electronics.

100% markup is keystone for retailers; anything less than that is tight margins.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#82

Post by rasz »

ptorrone wrote: post #52
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the problem. The Siemens Press Office employee doesn't have the domain knowledge of what Adafruit and Hackaday are that would be common knowledge to end users of their products, or would be if they, like their users would, bothered to do a cursory search before replying. These German megacorps put so much procedure and so many layers between the people who build stuff and the people who use it that it'…

i'll be interviewing them, so please let me know if there are any specific questions you want asked.

Ask Hackaday staff/management if they installed FAX machine yet, and typewriters. Half not joking.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#83

Post by kragen »

PavleMiha wrote: post #75
ChuckMcM wrote: post #55

This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?…

Purely anecdotally it looks to me that a lot of it moved to (pretty profitable) youtube channels, all the way from Mark Roper, to Applied Science, Simone Giertz, Michael Reeves, etc.

Ben Krasnow and Simone Giertz are pretty great, but they're hackers: the kind of people who used to shop at Radio Shack and read Modern Electronics. There's a world of difference between watching Simone Giertz build hilarious contraptions and building those contraptions yourself.

Chuck is saying that 40 years ago there were so many hackers doing these things that there was a whole workforce—partly, but not entirely, a hacker workforce—selling them what they needed for their arcane hobbies. And that, today, there isn't.

You seem to suggest that average teenage wankers watching Simone Giertz's escapades is roughly equivalent to 01980s hackers buying transistors at Radio Shack to build a walkie-talkie out of. They aren't. Watching a video of someone doing something is completely different from doing it yourself.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#84

Post by rasz »

kragen wrote: post #83
PavleMiha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely anecdotally it looks to me that a lot of it moved to (pretty profitable) youtube channels, all the way from Mark Roper, to Applied Science, Simone Giertz, Michael Reeves, etc.

Ben Krasnow and Simone Giertz are pretty great, but they're hackers : the kind of people who used to shop at Radio Shack and read Modern Electronics. There's a world of difference between watching Simone Giertz build hilarious contraptions and building those contraptions yourself. Chuck is saying that 40 years ago there were so many hackers doing these things that there was a whole workforce—partly, but not entirely,…

Whole workforce supplying hackers is still here and thriving, its just based in Shenzhen.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#85

Post by formerly_proven »

ipsum2 wrote: post #60
ChuckMcM wrote: post #55

This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?…

> like Adafruit, but even there the margins are tight and the operations are small I'm surprised, Adafruit has a 50-100% markup on most items compared to Aliexpress/other Chinese electronics.

Honestly with the prices on Ali or even eBay-direct-from-China-shipping it seems rather glaringly obvious that there are huge externalities attached to all of this.

Personally, I was never hugely into the connecting devboards together style of work (which is of course the fastest/best way to get results), which is pretty much only possible with "1 $ style" devboards, because eval boards have never been single-dollar items. I usually handwire everything or roll my own PCBs. I try to be conscious with component selection, if I can get components made in first-world countries I will pay the usually higher (1.5-3x) price tag for that. This is however somewhat difficult, because the country of origin is often hard to find out for components (and weirdly enough, many manufacturers are pretty quiet about it, even when it's made in the EU, Germany, UK, ...). It's a hobby, I don't really need to count pennies.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#86

Post by bsder »

baybal2 wrote: post #30
smarx007 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://supplyframe.com/why-supplyframe/ 70+ websites and a SaaS supply chain management intelligence software (Design-to-Source Intelligence as they call it) that nets $70M revenue annually...

$700M for $70M? I'd say it's still a very jaw dropping deal

That's actually about dead on. 10x run rate is the business school valuation.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#87

Post by iagovar »

rasz wrote: post #80
NockNock wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask why? Or what company?

In 1993 Siemens acquired ELWRO, Polish computer manufacturer (RIAD - IBM 360/370 mainframe clones for Russian/Indian market) and ZWUT, Polish telecommunication equipment manufacturer. They paid $38mln. First thing they did was to fire everyone from ELWRO. They also send manufacturing lines and unused parts stock back to Germany, and on top of it demolished manufacturing plants and sold off bare land. Good old German…

Great investment.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#88

Post by antattack »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #55

This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?…

Hobbyist money is still flowing, but most of it goes directly to China.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#89

Post by kragen »

spoonjim wrote: post #77
ChuckMcM wrote: post #55

This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?…

I disagree with your take on the "makers" market. The maker world is far more interesting today than in 1985. Yes, there are no "brick and mortar" stores because in 1985, brick and mortar was the only type of store that existed. Nowadays, Internet shopping is so developed that Adafruit, Sparkfun, Digi-Key, etc. don't need brick and mortar stores. The experience of shopping for parts online is much better than at a Ra…

I think this is right. In 01980 you needed a lot of people working on a magazine and buying ads in it to get Don Lancaster's columns out to the teeming unwashed masses. Now Don just posts them on https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu21.shtml#05.23.21 and he can publish lots more than he ever could back in the newsprint days. (The only loss is that he could use a proofreader.)

I don't know how much Don spends on hosting† to make everything he's ever written instantly available to every hacker in the whole world but I'm guessing it's about US$100 a month. Inflation-adjusted, that's probably less than Popular Electronics Magazine spent running the office coffeepot. Not counting the price of the coffee.

He's written about the days Chuck is—wrongly, I think—eulogizing in https://www.tinaja.com/glib/waywere.pdf.

The objective we should measure ourselves against is not the headcount in retail sales (though Amazon seems to have a workforce of substantial size) or the number of inkstains on people's hands; it's access to knowledge and tools, and the power to create that access unlocks. It's people dreaming of wonderful things that never were, and making them real. It's human flourishing.

So, how are we doing on that?

______

† Unlike people who just host on GitHub, who depend on Microsoft's continued goodwill to foot their publishing bill, Don hosts his own pages.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#90

Post by tpmx »

rasz wrote: post #80
NockNock wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask why? Or what company?

In 1993 Siemens acquired ELWRO, Polish computer manufacturer (RIAD - IBM 360/370 mainframe clones for Russian/Indian market) and ZWUT, Polish telecommunication equipment manufacturer. They paid $38mln. First thing they did was to fire everyone from ELWRO. They also send manufacturing lines and unused parts stock back to Germany, and on top of it demolished manufacturing plants and sold off bare land. Good old German…

Siemens buying a USSR-era IBM mainframe hardware clone manufacturing company ~28 years ago for a relatively small amount of money and then failing to do something useful with it seems very different from this story.
Post reply on HN