[usrusr]

True or not, "reliability bordering on childproof" can be a compelling sales pitch. And reputation is bound by recall, of whuch Arduino has plenty: brand X might have the best reputation imaginable amongst those in the know, but if you aren't in the know and you haven't ever heard of X all that reputation won't affect you. For all you know, X could be terrible. If there's another brand Y you have heard of, and only half of what you heard was negative, brand Y has at least some reputation (the non-negative half) positively affecting you.

That's the basic mechanism of why so much advertisement is just about brand awareness, not talking about quality at all: "I've heard a lot about them, and not everything has been bad" is less bad than "never heard about them, even if they were really terrible I wouldn't know"

[gw98]

I don't think you understand the industry. Reliability is qualified through testing, certification and support. It isn't a function of marketing.

Marketing gets you to the testing table. But better not have any skeletons in the cupboard.

Edit: I suspect you're confusing engineering for the niche sector of makers, the latter of which are driven by fads and marketing (sorry if I piss anyone off there).

[usrusr]

“The industry" isn't a single uniform group. Sure, people who spent their career procuring industrial controllers won't look at Arduino even once when they introduce a non-maker form factor, and chances are they wouldn't be impressed if they did. But I can easily imagine that there's an underserved space between the extremes of the maker juggling dev-boards not really intended for him and the career specialist who goes to all the right trade shows. Some company for example that has barely enough controller needs to set aside full time staff for that, but does not want to outsource either.

It's possible that Arduino fantasizes about taking over large fractions of the industrial PLC market and if that's the case I'll chuckle agreeingly with everybody ridiculing them, but I believe that there could far more reasonable and realistic opportunities for them to stretch a little in that direction.

[pclmulqdq]

Arduino is a marketing company that makes amateurish overpriced dev kits and sells them to amateurs. They have that market largely thanks to marketing moves.

Arduino products rarely sell to people who do any form of QC or comparison shopping - they sell to people who buy the first thing on their mind.

Most of the Chinese embedded companies are engineering groups that understand they are filling the low end of the professional cost-quality curve, but they are still on that curve. For what you pay, they make a great product.

[numpad0]

I see multiple comments recommending random Chinese PLC device from Aliexpress over this one. Where is the reputation and brand recognition of Arduino positively affecting anything here?

It also seems to me that your definition of the word "reliability" isn't agreeing well with others - to me it seems that these industry guys are using the word along "semi believable certification documents and soft established likelihood of not catching fire" whereas yours are more along "blind idolization for moral qualities seen in individual corporate employees". That might need a fix.