rasppi is a niche product. There will never be mass consumer appeal. Just like how you don't see advertisement for Ergodox keyboards. Even if they spent money on ad campaign, it will likely not move the revenue needle
I think it's relatively uncontroversial that advertising is a "strategy" for either low quality, not needed, or undifferentiated offerings, and that when looking at how a company goes to market, there is a choice of putting $ into advertising or into a better product.
I generally use advertising as a proxy for inverse utility. It would definitely be better to have more products that targeted being good, as opposed to ones that target influencing people to buy them.
>I think it's relatively uncontroversial that advertising is a "strategy" for either low quality, not needed, or undifferentiated offerings, and that when looking at how a company goes to market, there is a choice of putting $ into advertising or into a better product.
You mean like iPhones? Because Apple certainly advertises.
I'm not sure your statement applies broadly to automobile advertising either.
Why? Can you explain that thought process? i.e. everything should be niche? Like toothpaste for devops engineers who want their teeth to grow in the dark when they are around 2 or more wifi networks?
My thought process is that I personally would like to see more products with a higher focus on being good for a smaller group of people, rather than cheaper and /or worse but aimed at a huge audience. [0]
Focusing on delivering a good product to a smaller audience allows you to have tighter feedback loops and create more useful iterations because of that. You can also usually charge more. Personally, there are a lot of product spaces that I currently prefer or would prefer spending more for higher quality. But I don't always get that option due to the obsession with casting a wide net, as it were.
Do I expect this to happen organically? No, market forces seem to heavily incentivize races to the bottom.
[0]: NB my use of relative statements and not absolutes. Going from one extreme to the other likely won't produce a net positive.
Funnily enough I purchased an Ergodox EZ after clicking through an ad for it.
I actually see this a lot with "niche" products (audio equipment, home automation, keyboards, etc) where I will have never seen an ad for anything in that product category but once I start going to the hobbyist and store pages for such products I get inundated with ads for one specific offering in that category for a week or two before all of my ads go back to what the usually are.
The Pi is a hobbyist device, so yeah. But something like the Ergodox could definitely become popular if video game streamers used it, if there were displays in computer stores, etc. It's an interesting product but many people (like me) simply haven't heard of it.
Granted, I bought one and have put another in the shopping cart multiple times, so they probably have good reason to advertise to me. They know I'm a paying customer who's flirting with paying more.