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Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

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Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#61

Post by esskay »

botanical wrote: post #57

To me it feels like the Raspberry Pi Foundation hasn't met its objective of making computers accessible and affordable to everyone (especially children in disadvantaged areas). Each iteration is so expensive and previous iterations don't lose value or are made cheaper. It's more prudent to spend a bit more for a mini-pc. In South Africa, the average child from a disadvantaged background has no chance of buying a Pi.…

The true cost of a Pi these days can end up being more than a low-end mini pc once you add in all the extras you need to make it work. Power supply, sd card, etc. For education you'll need to throw in keyboard, mouse, speakers, possibly a microphone, monitor, cables, etc.

You can easly get to $150 without a monitor when going with a pi vs a lower cost second hand mini pc which is more powerful and upgradable, and can run linux or windows. They've priced themselves out of the education market.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#62

Post by nsteel »

esskay wrote: post #58
nsteel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence of a focus change during covid? Other than the obvious temporary changes all education outlets made during the pandemic? The charity still exists and still does all the same stuff: https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFounda...

They shifted focus to B2B, with all inventory over the pandemic going to those customers. Despite the chip shortage ending a long time ago they continued to push the line that they were still suffering from it. Later they confirmed in a few interviews that they were doing 100k units a month to thier B2B customers (the reason cited was due to B2B customers livelihoods relying on it which is fair enough). There was a d…

They had a stock shortage and they made a temporary decision you didn't like. We get that.

There is still no evidence here... what you say is just that.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#63

Post by michaelt »

jacquesm wrote: post #36
KaiserPro wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from memory there are three parts of what we think as Pi 1) the foundation, that does all the outreach, education and magazines 2) The commercial part (the actually makes the pis) 3) R&D but it might be only two. Either way I assume only the commercial part will float, leaving the foundation as the majority shareholder. It has the advantage of giving the foundation a couple of hundred million, which should allow it t…

Don't forget the Micro:bit and I'm not convinced "Arduino has kinda dropped the ball", they are doing just fine in the marketplace and the gear has come down in price to where $4 gets you a working microcontroller (and $5 for the Raspi 2040 pico). What you can get under $10 these days is mindblowing and if all Arduino ever did was make their IDE which ties 100's of different boards together under a common development…

> I'm not convinced "Arduino has kinda dropped the ball"

While Arduino is strong in many regards and was a big improvement on the status quo when it came out in ~2005, they weren't very fast to respond to the rise of the esp8266 and super-low-cost boards made in China.

For a long time their cheapest product was the Uno R3 (with a 16 MHz 8-bit ATmega328) for about $25 while you could buy a Wemos D1 mini (with a 160 MHz 32-bit esp8266) for $2 - or an Uno clone on aliexpress for $3.

Arduino have updated their product line since then (the Uno R4 Minima offers a 48MHz 32-bit RA4M1 for $19) and it's understandable they wanted to retain compatibility with their 5v shield ecosystem. But they were definitely slow to respond to a changing market.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#64

Post by benj111 »

esskay wrote: post #59
perbu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tiny insignificant part which owns the commerical part.

Not sure what your point is there. Owning the commercial arm is pretty irrelevent. Most businesses are owned by a holding company that does nothing more than file a return once a year.

So?

I don't know the precise structure, but Wikipedia is 'owned' by the wikimedia foundation.

It could be owned by Disney.

So the question is, who is the better custodian? A not for profit entity or a for profit one?

Raspberry pi is part owned by the raspberry pi foundation. The raspberry pi foundation shouldn't have a profit motive, so in that sense is a better custodian than some for profit 'holding company'.

No you could question, given they were prioritising business customers whether the foundation A) made the right decision or B) whether they have enough away over the company.

To me this all seems reminiscent of free software v open source.

A lot of people expected free(hard)ware, where it's becoming apparent it's more open source.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#65

Post by mschuster91 »

thinkingemote wrote: post #37
stavros wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for the results of this, I didn't even realize Kellogg's had a charitable arm until now.

A few (many?) breakfast cereals were started by religious charities in America. Quaker being most obvious via the name. Kellogg's origin was seventh day Adventist I think. I think there was a religious component to health foods at the time. But not sure why. One popular and possibly inaccurate reason was that bland vegetarian foods decreased the bodys animal nature.

[dead]

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#66

Post by rasz »

jt2190 wrote: post #16
larschdk wrote: post #9

To clarify, this is Raspberry Pi Ltd (formerly Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd), a subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation (the charity). I'm curious how this will affect the foundation's mission, but I guess they are already affected by the outside investments from previous fundraising rounds.

For an example of the long-term effects on mission, you can study Kellogg’s (the cereal company) which has been a for-profit public company (Kellogg Company), with a trust as the majority shareholder (W.K Kellogg Foundation Trust), and sending profits to to a non-profit charitable organization (W.K. Kellogg Foundation) since 1934.

IKEA is a rather famous "non profit". Patagonia recently became another "non profit" for tax and inheritance purposes.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#67

Post by phpisthebest »

theodric wrote: post #53
phpisthebest wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the story of just about every technology.... or even community Sad but it remains true, Thing is created > Small but devoted group discovers and popularized thing > Thing raises to mass popularity > The masses what to change the thing to be what they think it "should be" diverging from what the small but devoted group desired or signed on for > Thing becomes unrecognizable to the original group > New thing is…

If the Pi gets replaced, Chinese trash that is abandoned in a half-working state after zero updates will replace the Pi.* Or thin clients. Dark days ahead. *like, just random example, the Radxa Rock 3 https://youtu.be/KghZIgkKZcs

in this context what makes a difference if it is a Chinese companies abandoning the product vs a British company.

Is china the only nations making "trash"....

Further your video shows off several replacements with 1 having some kind of incompatibility with some carrier boards... Personally I have never been a fan of the Compute Module form factor anyway.. I prefer the full SBC boards. I think the Compute Module form factor lends itself to more complexity and issues.

The SBC Market is huge now, and sure you can point to market failures, companies that dont survive, products that get abandoned every market will have those, and I see that as a GOOD THING. not a bad thing.

That is capitalism, which I love, at work.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#68

Post by graemep »

benj111 wrote: post #64
esskay wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what your point is there. Owning the commercial arm is pretty irrelevent. Most businesses are owned by a holding company that does nothing more than file a return once a year.

So? I don't know the precise structure, but Wikipedia is 'owned' by the wikimedia foundation. It could be owned by Disney. So the question is, who is the better custodian? A not for profit entity or a for profit one? Raspberry pi is part owned by the raspberry pi foundation. The raspberry pi foundation shouldn't have a profit motive, so in that sense is a better custodian than some for profit 'holding company'. No yo…

Given your Wikipedia example I think my answer would be "neither" :)

The problem with non-profits owning profit making businesses is that it makes governance a lot more complex, tends to create conflicts of interest etc.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#69

Post by whywhywhywhy »

londons_explore wrote: post #3

Wasn't it supposed to be a charity/non profit foundation? Isn't an IPO kinda the opposite of that? Or is is the fashionable thing these days to claim to be non-profit when you're young and looking for grassroots support, only to transform when there is money to be made?

After Raspberry Pi, OpenAI and Processing Foundation I'll never trust a "non-profit" again

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#70

Post by graemep »

techdragon wrote: post #21
elashri wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What guarantee is there that the newly publicly listed company won't be pressured by stockholders to improve the profit margins by driving up prices and reducing product quality on both the hardware and software fronts. Isn't that what a public typical company do these days anyway? Or is there a sarcasm tone I am missing somehow?

That’s my point. They are ostensibly setup to primarily be a charity even if there’s a commercial organisation buried in the business structure (like Mozilla and a few other corps) … while the charity is in control the mission is simple, the charity is the owner and the owners of a company make the decisions. Shifting to publicly listed means the owners are now the shareholders, it’s rare that public shareholders hav…

It depends a lot on how they do it. How large a shareholding the non-profit retains, whether it retains controls by other means such as a golden share etc.
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