[jd75]

It's been said already, but these products were destroyed by support-forum-as-documentation. You can get a light blinking on an Arduino in five minutes. On the Edison, it took all my free time for a couple days to even figure out what pins were what. During that time, the excitement of building something more complicated on it evaporated. We are programmers, not documentation detectives on a scavenger hunt. I hope anyone who threw a bureaucratic monkey wrench into a proper documentation hub uses their unemployment to reflect.

[laydn]

I completely agree. Unfortunately, so many semiconductor vendors are going this way (for ICs) as well.

For example, there are so many parts on the Texas Instruments web site for which you can not get any support, unless you are a heavy volume customer. They even turned some of their product forums to "read-only". You can't even post a public question anymore.

Similarly, Xilinx had an official support channel (Webcase). A few years ago, they made to decision to only have that support channel open to their Tier 1 (or whatever they call them) customers. We can no longer ask for direct support from Xilinx with the money we spend on their chips (~100K USD worth of FPGAs) every year.

... and don't get me started on Qualcomm.

[tachyonbeam]

Not sure what these companies are thinking. They might not realize, but some small companies get big. Some of the young engineers of today will be the CEOs of tomorrow. The people who are getting shitty support from Xilinx and Qualcomm right now are likely not to want to do business with them later. Furthermore, some big companies actually do listen to what the engineers have to say. IMO, big tech companies are failing to understand why you should try to have the technical people be on your side.