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by mbanzi 1009 days ago
users, especially beginners, like consistency. So you call that "stagnation" I call that "avoid adding stuff that people don't really need". We make more than 100 different products so we haven't stagnated at all.
1 comments

And yet that "stuff people don't really need" is selling like hot cakes at your competitors, only for a worse variant to eventually show up at Arduino - although it probably won't even be carried by your own distributors. Sparkfun and Adafruit are reinventing the hobbyist ecosystem with STEMMA/Qwiic. Meanwhile Arduino was (despite the failed kickstarter) earlier to market with the competing ESLOV connector - which seven years later isn't even found on your own bread&butter controller boards.

Look, I had fun with Arduino back in the days, but in 2023 you folks simply don't have an attractive product range anymore. When I open Adafruit's website I am almost guaranteed to immediately be greeted by a handful of brand new products which immediately look interesting to me. When I open the Arduino website I have to do a lot of effort to even find a product lineup, and even when I manage to finally get there it isn't at all obvious what I should buy and why.

I own several Arduino products, and I genuinely forgot you existed. For your sake I sincerely hope I just live in a massive filter bubble and am massively mistaken about the hobbyist market.