<story><title>Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie</title><url>https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/05/17/siemens-acquires-supplyframe-hackaday-tindie-too/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spoonjim</author><text>I disagree with your take on the &amp;quot;makers&amp;quot; market. The maker world is far more interesting today than in 1985.&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are no &amp;quot;brick and mortar&amp;quot; stores because in 1985, brick and mortar was the only type of store that existed. Nowadays, Internet shopping is so developed that Adafruit, Sparkfun, Digi-Key, etc. don&amp;#x27;t need brick and mortar stores. The experience of shopping for parts online is much better than at a Radioshack -- it&amp;#x27;s not like you need to physically inspect a 555 timer to gain any information about it before you buy it, like you would with a winter jacket. The only thing lost is the ability to get a part &lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt; which sometimes sucks but that&amp;#x27;s life. We don&amp;#x27;t need 6 magazines anymore because people put their code on Github and their projects on YouTube, and for &lt;i&gt;free&lt;/i&gt;. Profits in the industry are probably lower but that&amp;#x27;s because there&amp;#x27;s more competition from other vendors and from people just sharing this stuff with no profit motive, which maybe sucks for the industry but is fantastic for the hobbyists of limited means.&lt;p&gt;Today, hobbyist makers are building stuff that actually does something useful, that has no commercial substitute. With Github, YouTube, forums, people are inspiring each other to make more interesting things than in 1985. Back in 1985 people were usually building stuff that could be bought. Today people are building stuff that can&amp;#x27;t be bought, and if there&amp;#x27;s enough of a market for it they productize it with Kickstarter or Tindie. People are sharing code and board designs and projects, and whether at the high end like Mark Rober or the low end like some guy&amp;#x27;s homebrewing controller the maker world is really bursting with success.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This is great news for Supplyframe.&lt;p&gt;But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The &amp;quot;makers market&amp;quot; of today doesn&amp;#x27;t work.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack&amp;#x2F;Tandy&amp;#x2F;Dick Smiths&amp;#x2F;Marples(sp?)), a host of retail outlets, and several equipment manufacturers selling into the market.&lt;p&gt;In the &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; era, there are no profitable magazines or web sites or blogs or ANYTHING with respect to this hobby, there are NO brick and mortar retail components stores, and no equipment maker sells into this market.&lt;p&gt;So why is this? I suspect that a large chunk of that is money. In particular, the &amp;quot;cost&amp;quot; of things has gone so far down that the money selling those things is a mere pittance of what it was before. But salaries of people to run these businesses, offices, etc hasn&amp;#x27;t changed. Nor has postage or warehouse space etc. But the interesting follow on effect is that it makes no sense to pay $8000 for an advertisement (the full page price of an ad in Modern Electronics in 1980) when you might generate an additional $4K in revenue. Similarly for blogs or podcasts where 70 to 90% of the ad revenue goes to the ad network (Google, Bing, Etc.)&lt;p&gt;Open source is great, but without money people have to work other jobs and so their ability to contribute quality time to their hobbies, much less full time to them, is that much harder to do.&lt;p&gt;I used to write free lance articles for Byte, Dr. Dobbs, and others and they would pay me $600 - $800 per article. A recent article suggests that the editors for Hackaday get paid but the places they link? They just get &amp;quot;exposure.&amp;quot; (cue the Oatmeal comic on spending &amp;quot;exposure&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;There are some standouts, like Adafruit, but even there the margins are tight and the operations are small. They are certainly not a &amp;quot;Radio Shack&amp;quot; level of enterprise.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what the &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; is, but there is some re-imagining, re-inventing that needs to go on here to pay these people who put in their time to make the &amp;quot;maker movement&amp;quot; work. Or it will continue to struggle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>I think you have a valid point but did you experience the &amp;quot;friction free&amp;quot; experience of walking into an electronics store idly and then walking out with all of the parts to build a project that afternoon? Most mixed HW&amp;#x2F;SW hackers accumulate a &amp;quot;stash&amp;quot; of components, and from that stash one can sometimes build new projects, but for me, there is a huge impediment when I have 90% of the parts and then have to wait for the last part for a week (well I can get it in a  couple of days if I pay $30 in shipping).&lt;p&gt;And the difference, for me, between user hosted content (Github and Youtube), and a magazine is that the magazine also has an editor who both made sure the article was clear and for the better magazines perhaps built the project themselves to see how it worked. There is a &lt;i&gt;ton&lt;/i&gt; of content from people who don&amp;#x27;t know what they are doing which obscures the content from people who do. It can be frustrating for people starting because there are so many variables. Did I build it wrong? Did they describe it correctly? Did I miss a step that was obvious to the writer but not me? You get a few projects that fail and you get disillusioned.&lt;p&gt;A good example of this is a high school kid I helped who was convinced they sucked at soldering because it never worked for them like it did on youtube. Except they were using silver solder &amp;quot;because that is what the hardware store had.&amp;quot; Hmmm? Obvious to someone who was taught soldering by someone who knew how to solder, but not obvious when the content creator &lt;i&gt;assumes&lt;/i&gt; everyone knows how to solder and what solders are used, so leaves that out of their presentations.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me started on Kickstarter :-) It has put more people into bankruptcy than MLM in my opinion. When you don&amp;#x27;t know what you don&amp;#x27;t know, how can you possibly predict how much money you need to deliver a random number of units of your idea?&lt;p&gt;Solid, curated, material for new people and advanced people. The stuff magazines used to provide, has made things more difficult rather than less difficult. And it is my opinion that this is at least part of the problem with declining STEM capabilities of students these days.</text></comment>
<story><title>Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie</title><url>https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/05/17/siemens-acquires-supplyframe-hackaday-tindie-too/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spoonjim</author><text>I disagree with your take on the &amp;quot;makers&amp;quot; market. The maker world is far more interesting today than in 1985.&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are no &amp;quot;brick and mortar&amp;quot; stores because in 1985, brick and mortar was the only type of store that existed. Nowadays, Internet shopping is so developed that Adafruit, Sparkfun, Digi-Key, etc. don&amp;#x27;t need brick and mortar stores. The experience of shopping for parts online is much better than at a Radioshack -- it&amp;#x27;s not like you need to physically inspect a 555 timer to gain any information about it before you buy it, like you would with a winter jacket. The only thing lost is the ability to get a part &lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt; which sometimes sucks but that&amp;#x27;s life. We don&amp;#x27;t need 6 magazines anymore because people put their code on Github and their projects on YouTube, and for &lt;i&gt;free&lt;/i&gt;. Profits in the industry are probably lower but that&amp;#x27;s because there&amp;#x27;s more competition from other vendors and from people just sharing this stuff with no profit motive, which maybe sucks for the industry but is fantastic for the hobbyists of limited means.&lt;p&gt;Today, hobbyist makers are building stuff that actually does something useful, that has no commercial substitute. With Github, YouTube, forums, people are inspiring each other to make more interesting things than in 1985. Back in 1985 people were usually building stuff that could be bought. Today people are building stuff that can&amp;#x27;t be bought, and if there&amp;#x27;s enough of a market for it they productize it with Kickstarter or Tindie. People are sharing code and board designs and projects, and whether at the high end like Mark Rober or the low end like some guy&amp;#x27;s homebrewing controller the maker world is really bursting with success.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This is great news for Supplyframe.&lt;p&gt;But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The &amp;quot;makers market&amp;quot; of today doesn&amp;#x27;t work.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack&amp;#x2F;Tandy&amp;#x2F;Dick Smiths&amp;#x2F;Marples(sp?)), a host of retail outlets, and several equipment manufacturers selling into the market.&lt;p&gt;In the &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; era, there are no profitable magazines or web sites or blogs or ANYTHING with respect to this hobby, there are NO brick and mortar retail components stores, and no equipment maker sells into this market.&lt;p&gt;So why is this? I suspect that a large chunk of that is money. In particular, the &amp;quot;cost&amp;quot; of things has gone so far down that the money selling those things is a mere pittance of what it was before. But salaries of people to run these businesses, offices, etc hasn&amp;#x27;t changed. Nor has postage or warehouse space etc. But the interesting follow on effect is that it makes no sense to pay $8000 for an advertisement (the full page price of an ad in Modern Electronics in 1980) when you might generate an additional $4K in revenue. Similarly for blogs or podcasts where 70 to 90% of the ad revenue goes to the ad network (Google, Bing, Etc.)&lt;p&gt;Open source is great, but without money people have to work other jobs and so their ability to contribute quality time to their hobbies, much less full time to them, is that much harder to do.&lt;p&gt;I used to write free lance articles for Byte, Dr. Dobbs, and others and they would pay me $600 - $800 per article. A recent article suggests that the editors for Hackaday get paid but the places they link? They just get &amp;quot;exposure.&amp;quot; (cue the Oatmeal comic on spending &amp;quot;exposure&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;There are some standouts, like Adafruit, but even there the margins are tight and the operations are small. They are certainly not a &amp;quot;Radio Shack&amp;quot; level of enterprise.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what the &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; is, but there is some re-imagining, re-inventing that needs to go on here to pay these people who put in their time to make the &amp;quot;maker movement&amp;quot; work. Or it will continue to struggle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kragen</author><text>I think this is right.  In 01980 you needed a lot of people working on a magazine and buying ads in it to get Don Lancaster&amp;#x27;s columns out to the teeming unwashed masses.  Now Don just posts them on &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tinaja.com&amp;#x2F;whtnu21.shtml#05.23.21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tinaja.com&amp;#x2F;whtnu21.shtml#05.23.21&lt;/a&gt; and he can publish lots more than he ever could back in the newsprint days.  (The only loss is that he could use a proofreader.)&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know how much Don spends on hosting† to make &lt;i&gt;everything he&amp;#x27;s ever written instantly available to every hacker in the whole world&lt;/i&gt; but I&amp;#x27;m guessing it&amp;#x27;s about US$100 a month.  Inflation-adjusted, that&amp;#x27;s probably less than Popular Electronics Magazine spent running the office coffeepot.  Not counting the price of the coffee.&lt;p&gt;He&amp;#x27;s written about the days Chuck is—wrongly, I think—eulogizing in &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tinaja.com&amp;#x2F;glib&amp;#x2F;waywere.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tinaja.com&amp;#x2F;glib&amp;#x2F;waywere.pdf&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;The objective we should measure ourselves against is not the headcount in retail sales (though Amazon seems to have a workforce of substantial size) or the number of inkstains on people&amp;#x27;s hands; it&amp;#x27;s access to knowledge and tools, and the power to create that access unlocks.  It&amp;#x27;s people dreaming of wonderful things that never were, and making them real.  It&amp;#x27;s human flourishing.&lt;p&gt;So, how are we doing on that?&lt;p&gt;______&lt;p&gt;† Unlike people who just host on GitHub, who depend on Microsoft&amp;#x27;s continued goodwill to foot their publishing bill, Don hosts his own pages.</text></comment>