[blagie]

I, respectfully, disagree with this analysis.

Prototyping platforms have tiny markets, but lead to downstream sales. Many a company were brought down by more developer-friendly platforms ignoring the "tiny" userbase of people who want to do unconventional things.

Most IC vendors provide free samples and support because of this. That's a market size of close to zero -- electronic engineers -- but leads to a market size of "massive." I can get an application engineer to visit my office for free to help me develop if I want.

Arguably, iPhone and Android won by supporting the tiny market of developers, who went on to build an ecosystem of applications, some long-tail, and some unexpected successes.

And arguably, x86 won for the same reason.

Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino.

Balmer said "Developers! developers! developers!" Visual Studio was not a major revenue driver for Microsoft; what was developed in it was.

[jsheard]

> Prototyping platforms have tiny markets, but lead to downstream sales. Many a company were brought down by more developer-friendly platforms ignoring the "tiny" userbase of people who want to do unconventional things.

Qualcomm doesn't even make small/cheap MCUs so they aren't going to win over that market by buying Arduino. Their first board post-acquisition is a mashup of a Linux SBC with an MCU devkit, and while the Linux SOC is from QCOM, the MCU is from ST Micro.

[jack_tripper]

>Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino.

How do you know the 500 million sales is due to the Arduino ecosystem?

I used to work in embedded for 10+ years and in the 4 companies I worked at so far, none of the products ever featured AVR microcontrollers. The microcontroller of choice for production was always based on the feature/cost ratio for each application, never on the "is it part of the Arduino ecosystem?" question.

Tinkering with Arduino at home, and building products for mass production, have widely different considerations.

[tor825gl]

If they sold 500 million microcontrollers and your workplaces never bought any, then your experience doesn't tell us anything about why the people that did buy them, bought them.

[bigfishrunning]

All of the products that i've been involved with that included AVR microcontrollers are from before the Arduino platform existed. The STMicro ARM M3 chips are more capable and cheaper then the 8-bit AVRs; The Arduino IDE never factored into the decision, even at the height of its popularity.

[blagie]

FWIW: I've used Arduinos, but never with their IDE.

AVR was super-developer-friendly well before the Arduino. It replaced the PIC for a lot of hobbyist projects.

To the points in the thread, on major product development, these things don't matter. On the long tail of smaller products, as well as on unexpected successes, they do.

[bluGill]

That is the downside. you can prototype with one chip and when the concept works switch. I've worked with many projects over the years where that was done. Sometimes an intern proved it works with arduino - which wat cheap enough to buy without needing supply management, but then we did the project with 'good code' on our internal controllers. Othertimes we bought a competitor andiagain first thing switched them to our controllers. (Our controllers are designed for harsh environments which means millions of dollars spent designing the case and connectors)