91–100 of 219 posts
AI by providing a continuum from hardware to Cloud How about crypto, it misses the buzzword crypto
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I predict they'll go after microcontroller manufacturers first. "Do you want your dev boards supported by the Arduino Ecosystem? Pay us 10% of revenue, and then we'll talk."
I don't doubt that they'll try, but I don't think they have the market position to pull that off anymore, not with ESP32 et al. ascendant. Or maybe I'm just out of touch with that side of the market, hard to tell.
Oh :-( Every time a cool little company gets VC funding, you know that the free and opensource projects will dry up, and before long they'll be making premium high end products and suing anyone who tries to compete.
I predict they'll go after microcontroller manufacturers first. "Do you want your dev boards supported by the Arduino Ecosystem? Pay us 10% of revenue, and then we'll talk."
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Many makers I know of are using PlatformIO these days: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=platform...
There was recently a flareup on HN about PlatformIO trying to make money by charging a fee to vendors to be supported ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36090536 ). Maybe Arduino wants in on that. I honestly don't see how such strategies work long-term though. As a former embedded SW engineer, the Arduino IDE seems very toy-like - which is excellent for people just starting out, but not something a company develo…
Incidentally, and naively, I have to ask: Is there a business model that can promise customers a product that's immune to eventual usurpation? It's a hidden cost to build your world around a product only to see it turn into pay-to-play. What is the antidote to this trend?
They'd basically need to lose all protection on their product, making it a de facto open source (note that there are companies operating on open source stuff, but they actually make money out of the things they don't open source - such as "pro version" or know how). Plus, investors value the pool of recurring customers far more than basic cash flow or such (because you can squeeze them more) and the next best thing is customers you can make recurring customers by moving your product to a subscription model.
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There isn't any debt to service. Taking funding isn't the same as taking debt (in some ways its worse, in some better), and there's no direct interest or payment they have to make every month like if it was debt. The problem is that they give up ownership (and probably ownership) to people who may have different goals and values. This can lead to enshittification, especially for a company that doesn't have a good pat…
Isn't "raising funds" just a euphemism for taking a loan you don't have to return in cash? Like a loan which is not regulated as a loan
Oh :-( Every time a cool little company gets VC funding, you know that the free and opensource projects will dry up, and before long they'll be making premium high end products and suing anyone who tries to compete.
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Why not be negative? They're not being given $22m for funsies. The backers will want a 10x return, so somehow Arduino must now raise their value to $220 million (actually $540 million, since they raised $54m in total). Where's that money coming from?
I understand your concerns, I am just pointing out the general dissatisfaction raised here and the expectation of enshittification being the default. I would also like to point out that you are extrapolating a bit too hard. The claim that backers will want a 10x return is not necessarily correct, nor are the examples of 220/540m valid from a valuation perspective. There are PE firms which do not seek such exorbitant…
“Anzu Partners is an investment firm that focuses on industrial and life science technology companies with the potential to transform their industries.”
“[CDP Venture Capital seeks to] foster the growth of the Italian market by attracting new national and international investors to the Venture Capital asset class by promoting a new culture of Venture Capital and entrepreneurship in Italy.”
In case you are unaware, these statements are VC dog whistles for not 10x but 100-1000x returns, without some probability of which the VC model does not work financially.
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Yup. I switched to ESPs for projects and won't go back to Arduino. I had to fix someone else's Arduino based art installation a couple weeks ago and it seemed weird and very retro going back to work with that Arduino form factor. That said, maybe they have a future being a standard component in industrial settings. I would tend to trust an Arduino more than an ESP in critical infrastructure.
> I would tend to trust an Arduino more than an ESP in critical infrastructure. Arduino has always come across to me as being for hobbyist/beginner/learning, and critical infra would use things more like, for example, STMicro or Texas Instruments microcontrollers