It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.
It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.
Everyone here seems pretty negative on this news. Any particular reason?
Going publicly traded fucks every company up with nextquarter-itis.
Mostly that IPOs put companies into ‘infinite growth mode’ which is obviously impossible, so their product just degrades over time. They can’t just do ‘good enough’ anymore.
Also the reason why every company that is consistently ‘good’ is run privately. If you answer to nobody but yourself you have a lot more room for long term plans
The real sad thing is that you and the person you replied to are talking like “publicly traded” and “private” are the only two options, because worker cooperatives are so rare everybody forgets about them.
For me anything “private” just means you can’t buy shares publicly. Worker cooperatives would be included in that (since you need to be a worker to own a “share”)
And those go public anyway. I used to work for the largest employee owned company.
Costco might be an exception here, though may degrade once the leading team dies or exits.
Well, the founder made death threats and I for one believe him.
Wut. When was this?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/costco-founder-kill-hotdogs/
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If I ever become famous, I hope it’s for a quote with context as great as this.
I heard someone suggested they raise the price of the $1.50 hot dog…and he just lost it.
…/shitpost
Just because you are private, doesn’t mean that you answer only to yourself. It depends on how the company is structured and what shares (if any) the leadership holds. In some cases it can be worse because the person who has the shares to force you to do what they want will be able to keep their position without any oversight. Boards in public trades companies are at least public.
Discord is a great example of this. They are privately held and their quality is starting to go down.
Shout-out to Patagonia.
Raspberry pi foundation was launched as a charity, and the end goal was to produce a ton of very cheap computers to help children learn about programming. Since then, it has been soo ubiquitous for embedded stuff that for the last couple of years they have basically become unaffordable for the very audience they were intended for. Now they are seeking an ipo because they are used in everything, except as cheap computers for children.
Are they really used in a bunch of stuff? I still onlt see them included in hobby/homelab/maker/education stuff.
Every time a company goes public, they become more and more profitable until the only way to continue on that trajectory is to worsen their own product.
Think they’ll still be selling the Pico for $4 or the Zero for $15 after they’re reporting to shareholders?
Big pharma companies jack up the prices of life saving medicine that’s been affordable for decades and don’t lose a bit of sleep. You bet your ass a hobby electronics company will jack up prices as far as they think they can.
Price is one thing but the push for returns on investments is massive, this means that it’s time to start cutting corners on everything (except maybe marketing! Yea!). Quality, repairability, and innovation all start to crumble.
Don’t call Raspberry a hobbyist electronics company. Their primary consumer has been business and enterprise customers for years now, industrial/controls companies jumped all over the pi as a super easy drop-in board that can be programmed by any code monkey.
The Pi hardware shortage of the last few years has mostly been because of this demand, with Raspberry openly saying they were prioritizing bulk corporate orders foe their production volume over hobby consumers. Fuck the little guy, Pi is dead.
Going public introduces shareholders that prioritizes return on investment as opposed to making technology and knowledge about technology accessible for many.
It doesn’t always end this way but often enough to worry about it…
Because the more commercial they get, the more they stray from their original purpose as a charity to provide low-cost machines for kids to learn about computer science.
First there was the Dynabook, then OLPC, then Raspberry Pi, and now we’ve basically got to start over yet again because enshittification is imminent.
In Tech, an IPO means the business is market ready to be sold off in pieces, ie stocks. The people who buy the product don’t care what it does, they use the product maker as a vehicle to more growth and profit. Typically that means the people who now own the business make poor choices about cost cutting, like off shoring support and removing unuseful documentation while removing people with critical tribal knowledge about processes. Each step the new owner takes will be to make the business more profitable, and in the world of business, the only thing they care about are the numbers and not the environment or people that created those numbers.
Opening up to institutional investment means opening yourself up to ownership by a culture that demands infinite growth. In recent years this has gotten particularly bad; with the rise in interest rates, stocks can no longer deliver moderate growth and still be considered worthwhile investments. Everything is either a rocketship to the moon, or its a sell. Combine that with a string of US court cases that have interpreted tge law in such a way as to foster the belief that its illegal for companies to put anything ahead of shareholder value, and what you get is a top down imperative to squeeze the maximum profit out of everything. When you see Microsoft mulling over ideas like putting ads in your start menu, or EA talking about in-game advertising, this is why. When you see Spotify raising prices multiple times while crowing about how their content production costs are basically non-existent and changing their contracts so that smaller artists literally don’t get paid for their music, this is why.
They did spend the last few years screwing over any customer that wasn’t some giant corporation on a product that was originally created as a low cost tool for educational purposes.
They think that it’s gonna ruin the company
And they’re right.
There are a high proportion of far-left types on here. I could see them wanting something to be government-owned or something. But wanting a company to be privately-owned rather than publicly-owned seems odd to me.
And the “enshittification” comments seem odd too.
“Enshittification” isn’t some sort of catch-all term for a company doing worse. Doctorow coined it to refer to a point where a company that had been losing money to grow a customer base ends the rapid-growth phase and starts monetizing that base.
That makes business sense for some companies with low marginal costs and high fixed costs, and especially where there is network effect, like social media companies.
But here, the company is profitable, and not unreasonably so. Like, they don’t have a monetization phase that they need to transition to.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/11/raspberry-pi-is-now-a-public-company-as-its-shares-pops-after-ipo-pricing/?guccounter=1
We’re mostly negative on publicly traded companies because their ceo is legally obligated to squeeze blood from a stone or they quite literally will get sued by the shareholders, plenty of examples out there. The exceptions are usually there because the previous owners wrote contracts, etc to help keep the company as it was prior but even then it only works for so long. Check out Ben and Jerry’s and their whole debacle on the subject.
There are certain fiduciary obligations that CEOs hold to shareholders. But on the flip side, if someone opposes the transition of privately-owned companies to being publicly-owned, then their position is that only the wealthy, those who can outright own a company rather than only part of it, via shares, may own companies. That seems quite like a policy exceptionally loaded towards the wealthy. It would make capital much harder to get, so it would be harder for someone who wants to start a company to do so. Only very wealthy entities – stuff like very wealthy families – would be able to own companies of any significant size. They would have little competition for their capital, and would be able to demand extremely favorable terms for it. Less-wealthy people would be intrinsically disadvantaged by their inability to must outright buy companies. Less capital availability would tend to impact wages negatively.
It seems to me stupendously at odds with the sort of thing that I would expect someone on the left end of the spectrum to want.