It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.
As long as Raspberry Pi doesn’t start ripping off their customers, I will happily stay with them. Most other SBCs are made by Chinese companies, which I definitely won’t buy. Hell no, I’m not supporting the Chinese economy.
As long as Raspberry Pi doesn’t start ripping off their customers
Give it 2 weeks (max) after the IPO
Hell no, I’m not supporting the Chinese economy.
Lol, I agree with you, but realistically you probably have only avoided a fraction of Chinese made crap
I don’t so much care where it’s made. The real selling point, to me, for Pi is that their products are well documented, in English, and solutions for problems are easily googled. There’s tons of SBCs out there, some of them even inexpensive, but I can’t tell if any are going to last longer than a single production run. Meanwhile, I can still buy a Pi 3 after almost a decade. Or I can take the hat I made for a Pi3, plug it straight into a new Pi Zero, and expect it to work without changes.
IPO is a big step down the path to enshittification, especially when there’s no clear, dominant alternative.
Sooner or later capitalism ruins everything.
Then it’s a good thing that no countries have pure capitalism for their economy.
We need regulation on corporations to keep them in check.
then it’s a good thing that no countries have pure capitalism for their economy
America: 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅🦅
America doesn’t have a pure capitalist economy.
A pure capitalist economy would have a free market system with no government intervention.
Almost every country has a mix between capitalism and socialism for their economies.
A pure capitalist economy is terrible just as much as a pure socialist economy would be terrible.
The trick is finding the right balance between the two.
If you’re having trouble finding when it is enforced you can look at websites like this one that list out the many cases brought up against companies (for the U.S. at least).
The fact that regulations make capitalism less dangerous doesn’t mean that capitalism is fine as long as its regulated.
Hand grenades have a tonne of safety features, but you wouldn’t let your kid play with one. “Safer” isn’t the same thing as “safe”.
What would you propose as being better than the mix of capitalism and socialism that almost every country already has for their economy?
Both extremes lead to terrible outcomes.
I’d let my kid play with a grenade. Then again, I don’t have kids by choice, so to imply I had kids would be to imply that at some point something went terribly wrong. But rectified in the most absurd method possible.
Plus, you couldn’t go to jail for child abuse, because what parent is “double checking” that the grenade he’s playing with is in fact a toy? BECAUSE WHERE THE HELL DOES THIS 3 YEAR OLD GET A GRENADE???
That logic would track in court. A very sad, very bizzare set of circumstances. That theres no way you could blame the parent for.
Everyone here seems pretty negative on this news. Any particular reason?
There are a high proportion of far-left types on here. I could see them wanting something to be government-owned or something. But wanting a company to be privately-owned rather than publicly-owned seems odd to me.
And the “enshittification” comments seem odd too.
“Enshittification” isn’t some sort of catch-all term for a company doing worse. Doctorow coined it to refer to a point where a company that had been losing money to grow a customer base ends the rapid-growth phase and starts monetizing that base.
That makes business sense for some companies with low marginal costs and high fixed costs, and especially where there is network effect, like social media companies.
But here, the company is profitable, and not unreasonably so. Like, they don’t have a monetization phase that they need to transition to.
In 2023 alone, Raspberry Pi generated $266 million in revenue and $66 million in gross profit.
Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, valuing it at £542 million, or $690 million at today’s exchange rate.
We’re mostly negative on publicly traded companies because their ceo is legally obligated to squeeze blood from a stone or they quite literally will get sued by the shareholders, plenty of examples out there. The exceptions are usually there because the previous owners wrote contracts, etc to help keep the company as it was prior but even then it only works for so long. Check out Ben and Jerry’s and their whole debacle on the subject.
There are certain fiduciary obligations that CEOs hold to shareholders. But on the flip side, if someone opposes the transition of privately-owned companies to being publicly-owned, then their position is that only the wealthy, those who can outright own a company rather than only part of it, via shares, may own companies. That seems quite like a policy exceptionally loaded towards the wealthy. It would make capital much harder to get, so it would be harder for someone who wants to start a company to do so. Only very wealthy entities – stuff like very wealthy families – would be able to own companies of any significant size. They would have little competition for their capital, and would be able to demand extremely favorable terms for it. Less-wealthy people would be intrinsically disadvantaged by their inability to must outright buy companies. Less capital availability would tend to impact wages negatively.
It seems to me stupendously at odds with the sort of thing that I would expect someone on the left end of the spectrum to want.
Mostly that IPOs put companies into ‘infinite growth mode’ which is obviously impossible, so their product just degrades over time. They can’t just do ‘good enough’ anymore.
Also the reason why every company that is consistently ‘good’ is run privately. If you answer to nobody but yourself you have a lot more room for long term plans
The real sad thing is that you and the person you replied to are talking like “publicly traded” and “private” are the only two options, because worker cooperatives are so rare everybody forgets about them.
Just because you are private, doesn’t mean that you answer only to yourself. It depends on how the company is structured and what shares (if any) the leadership holds. In some cases it can be worse because the person who has the shares to force you to do what they want will be able to keep their position without any oversight. Boards in public trades companies are at least public.
Discord is a great example of this. They are privately held and their quality is starting to go down.
Costco might be an exception here, though may degrade once the leading team dies or exits.
Opening up to institutional investment means opening yourself up to ownership by a culture that demands infinite growth. In recent years this has gotten particularly bad; with the rise in interest rates, stocks can no longer deliver moderate growth and still be considered worthwhile investments. Everything is either a rocketship to the moon, or its a sell. Combine that with a string of US court cases that have interpreted tge law in such a way as to foster the belief that its illegal for companies to put anything ahead of shareholder value, and what you get is a top down imperative to squeeze the maximum profit out of everything. When you see Microsoft mulling over ideas like putting ads in your start menu, or EA talking about in-game advertising, this is why. When you see Spotify raising prices multiple times while crowing about how their content production costs are basically non-existent and changing their contracts so that smaller artists literally don’t get paid for their music, this is why.
Every time a company goes public, they become more and more profitable until the only way to continue on that trajectory is to worsen their own product.
Think they’ll still be selling the Pico for $4 or the Zero for $15 after they’re reporting to shareholders?
Big pharma companies jack up the prices of life saving medicine that’s been affordable for decades and don’t lose a bit of sleep. You bet your ass a hobby electronics company will jack up prices as far as they think they can.
Don’t call Raspberry a hobbyist electronics company. Their primary consumer has been business and enterprise customers for years now, industrial/controls companies jumped all over the pi as a super easy drop-in board that can be programmed by any code monkey.
The Pi hardware shortage of the last few years has mostly been because of this demand, with Raspberry openly saying they were prioritizing bulk corporate orders foe their production volume over hobby consumers. Fuck the little guy, Pi is dead.
In Tech, an IPO means the business is market ready to be sold off in pieces, ie stocks. The people who buy the product don’t care what it does, they use the product maker as a vehicle to more growth and profit. Typically that means the people who now own the business make poor choices about cost cutting, like off shoring support and removing unuseful documentation while removing people with critical tribal knowledge about processes. Each step the new owner takes will be to make the business more profitable, and in the world of business, the only thing they care about are the numbers and not the environment or people that created those numbers.
Raspberry pi foundation was launched as a charity, and the end goal was to produce a ton of very cheap computers to help children learn about programming. Since then, it has been soo ubiquitous for embedded stuff that for the last couple of years they have basically become unaffordable for the very audience they were intended for. Now they are seeking an ipo because they are used in everything, except as cheap computers for children.
Because the more commercial they get, the more they stray from their original purpose as a charity to provide low-cost machines for kids to learn about computer science.
First there was the Dynabook, then OLPC, then Raspberry Pi, and now we’ve basically got to start over yet again because enshittification is imminent.
I’m sorry but all of these doom and gloom comments are insufferable.
A. The raspberry pis that you have known and loved are all still around and, considering inflation, cheaper than ever. If you’re complaining about prices, stop buying from scalpers!
B. All this talk of enshittification and decline is purely and 100% speculative. You are acting like your catastrophic fears are a forgone conclusion when they’re, at best, a guess.
Maybe. I’ll be the first one to call out bad behavior but at this point it’s just knee jerk anticorporate fervor.
The worst thing raspberry pi ever did is dare to be an electronic company during the worst electronics part shortage in our lifetime. People complaining they couldn’t get a pi to do their dinky personal project are the epitome of having first world problems. Prices and availability have been back to normal for over a year now and people still gripe about it. I’m just over it.
They’ve crossed the event horizon of enshitification.
