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Raspberry Pi is now a public company (techcrunch.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 140 points 2 years ago (4 children)

is this the 'jumped the shark' moment for companies? as soon as they go 'public' you can no longer assume their product is their priority.

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  • [–] 88 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yes

    You can expect them to drop at maybe one more good product, as going public is what companies do when they want to raise a lot of funds for some project

    But after THAT, when it turns out that the new product is just... Making money instead of making ALL the money, the investors will take over and from then on it's fucked.

    But yeah RPi has alternatives now. No need to tie yourself to them when they DO sink.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I ordered a BananaPi board years ago but then life took me places where I didn't have time or energy to follow up. I've recently rejoined the hobbyist homelab market, so I've quite interested. I'd read that drivers could be an issue with non-Pi boards but haven't ever found out. Which boards / companies are recommendation-worthy at the moment?

    Asking twice because two people had similar replies and I'm looking for feedback, not because I want to spam the thread.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago*

    The question is always: What do you want to use it for?

    When raspberry started the landscape was very difficult. Small computer boards were expensive, now there's the N100 if you need a tiny cheap computer. Microcontrollers were really dumb and unconnected, now there's the ESP32 which has WiFi and Bluetooth and decent performance. Right in the middle of this wide spectrum is the raspberry pi and its clones.

    This is a very different situation than in the introduction era where PCs were heavy and expensive and microcontrollers were dumb. There was a much wider niche for the raspberry then. For a small server I would now get a $100 N100 from aliexpress. For embedded electronics I would grab a $10 ESP32. Only in the middle is the raspberry pi, but the problem is, it's only in the middle in terms of performance, not price. A raspberry pi with case, PSU, storage etc costs more than a decked out N100, while actually being slower.

    The only remaining usecase I see for a pi 5 would be an electronics project where you need some more compute than a microcontroller can provide, like some machine vision project. Otherwise:

    • Do you want to make some electronics IoT thingy: Get an ESP32
    • Do you want a small light computer or server: Get an N100
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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago

    Ad soon as they go public, their product is their share price. And even before then, since most growing private companies seek out private investment long before going public.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Exactly. I'm not worried though. There are so many alternatives these days.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    I ordered a BananaPi board years ago but then life took me places where I didn't have time or energy to follow up. I've recently rejoined the hobbyist homelab market, so I've quite interested. I'd read that drivers could be an issue with non-Pi boards but haven't ever found out. Which boards / companies are recommendation-worthy at the moment?

    Asking twice because two people had similar replies and I'm looking for feedback, not because I want to spam the thread.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Legally the product is no longer their priority, maximising shareholder profits is their priority.

    Not many companies manage to not get twisted to a worse product for the customers, though their ads get really good

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    • [–] 94 points 2 years ago

    God damn it. It was nice while it lasted

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    [–] 40 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    INB4 trust fund babies and gormless capitalists go and ream every last fucking cent from the brand destroying it in the process before moving on to the next thing.

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    • [–] 35 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The enshittification begins.

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    • [–] 33 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    No, being a public company the CEO is legally obligated to chase profits

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    This is a common misconception based on an argument put forward my Milton Friedman. It’s based on legal cases where CEOs were taken to court for knowingly defrauding shareholders for their own personal gain (say, selling all of a companies assets of the company to a different company the ceo owns privately for a single dollar).

    Friedman argued that these cases set precedent that meant all CEO were legally obligated to maximize shareholder value and could be held legally accountable for not doing so. Friedman was wrong about this, like many other things he said, as he was not a lawyer, nor a particularly good economist. No CEO has even been successfully sued for “failing to maximize shareholder value” despite some people taking Friedman’s work to heart and trying to do so.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It comes from the case against Henry Ford after he saw his company was making gobs of cash and decided to give some of that to his employees. Shareholders successfully sued him to stop this on the grounds that he has a fiduciary duty to shareholders.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

    As with anything legal, there is nuance, but the basic assertion that there is fiduciary duty to shareholders is not wrong.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    He was sued for miss use of company profits, not for failing to maximize profits.

    He took profits and was reinvesting in new plants and cutting car prices, while also ending dividend payments to do so. That was the crux of the case, ending dividend payments despite having money to continue paying them. This case is routinely held up as an example of shareholder primacy but has been dismissed as an example of such by most modern thinkers In the field, in large part because the court also ruled that he had final say on how to proceed with company operation. Increasing worker pay was not the issue, ending dividends to make capital investment was.

    Edit: also, I should clarify, he was the majority share holder, and the minority shareholders could thus not replace him with someone willing to pay dividends. He was not being sued for failing to seek profits, he was being sued for holding those profits hostage from other shareholders.

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    • [–] 25 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I hope this isn't the prelude to a decline. I just ordered my third Pi over the weekend. It should arrive today. I'd hate to see the platform squandered by "make number go up" types.

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  • [+] 39 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'm not familiar. Any recommendations?

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  • [+] 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Hope that happens, maybe my riscv potato might get some use

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    • [–] 14 points 2 years ago

    For fucks sake.

    I just wanted a cm4

    :neocat_cry:

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    [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'm surprised it lasted this long. It was always kinda just a marketing gimmick for broadcom that got out of hand.

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    • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Shit

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