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aseriesoftubes ,

Everyone here seems pretty negative on this news. Any particular reason?

nevemsenki ,

Going publicly traded fucks every company up with nextquarter-itis.

Dasnap ,
@Dasnap@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Vitaly ,
@Vitaly@feddit.uk avatar

They think that it’s gonna ruin the company

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

And they’re right.

mindlight ,

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…

Addv4 ,

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.

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Are they really used in a bunch of stuff? I still onlt see them included in hobby/homelab/maker/education stuff.

ChicoSuave ,

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.

The_Picard_Maneuver ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

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?

BrianTheeBiscuiteer ,

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.

empireOfLove2 OP ,
@empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

Imgonnatrythis ,

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.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

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.

techcrunch.com/…/raspberry-pi-is-now-a-public-com…

In 2023 alone, Raspberry Pi generated $266 million in revenue and $66 million in gross profit.

Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, valuing it at £542 million, or $690 million at today’s exchange rate.

Riven ,
@Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

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.

grue ,

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.

Voroxpete ,

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.

ShepherdPie ,

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.

federino ,

fuck us

Holzkohlen ,

AI nonsense privacy disrespecting “feature” coming next week

cyberpunk007 ,

Announcing: Raspberry pi recall

afraid_of_zombies ,

been slowly replacing the PLCs with PIs at my work.

JackbyDev ,

Raspberry Pi has been over priced for a long time. I’m not saying they’ve been a net positive or negative, but if you think this will make them a bad company then I think they’ve been pretty bad for a bit.

skybox ,

Here’s to hoping a solid sbc with gpio pins and solid software support shows up as a competitor to keep them in check?

peopleproblems ,

:(

ashok36 ,

I’m sorry but all of these doom and gloom comments are insufferable.

A. The raspberry pis that you have known and loved are all still around and, considering inflation, cheaper than ever. If you’re complaining about prices, stop buying from scalpers!

B. All this talk of enshittification and decline is purely and 100% speculative. You are acting like your catastrophic fears are a forgone conclusion when they’re, at best, a guess.

Halosheep ,

You are a pretty optimistic person.

ashok36 ,

Maybe. I’ll be the first one to call out bad behavior but at this point it’s just knee jerk anticorporate fervor.

The worst thing raspberry pi ever did is dare to be an electronic company during the worst electronics part shortage in our lifetime. People complaining they couldn’t get a pi to do their dinky personal project are the epitome of having first world problems. Prices and availability have been back to normal for over a year now and people still gripe about it. I’m just over it.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

Shit. Need to grab a couple spare Pis now while they’re still good.

Someonelol ,

I’m willing to bet they’ll start adding telemetry features in RPiOS for “quality purposes” a few years from now.

ricdeh ,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

They already have that proprietary and opaque GPU that has full memory access akin to the Intel ME, and its programming is very difficult to audit. There has been something quite fishy about them ever since they left their educational mission behind after the Pi 1 and went for-profit.

stsquad ,

Isn’t the GPU documented now?

docs.broadcom.com/doc/12358545

There are reverse engineered docs as well: github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv

impure9435 ,

As long as Raspberry Pi doesn't start ripping off their customers, I will happily stay with them. Most other SBCs are made by Chinese companies, which I definitely won't buy. Hell no, I'm not supporting the Chinese economy.

cm0002 ,

As long as Raspberry Pi doesn’t start ripping off their customers

Give it 2 weeks (max) after the IPO

Hell no, I’m not supporting the Chinese economy.

Lol, I agree with you, but realistically you probably have only avoided a fraction of Chinese made crap

BrianTheeBiscuiteer ,

I’d be amazed if most of the Pi components weren’t from China but feel free to correct me.

tburkhol ,

I don’t so much care where it’s made. The real selling point, to me, for Pi is that their products are well documented, in English, and solutions for problems are easily googled. There’s tons of SBCs out there, some of them even inexpensive, but I can’t tell if any are going to last longer than a single production run. Meanwhile, I can still buy a Pi 3 after almost a decade. Or I can take the hat I made for a Pi3, plug it straight into a new Pi Zero, and expect it to work without changes.

IPO is a big step down the path to enshittification, especially when there’s no clear, dominant alternative.

StaySquared ,

Oh jees… welp it was great while it lasted.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

It could be neat if there was such a thing as like a FairPi (like FairPhone I mean, e.g. repairable). Arguably that would have almost defeated the main purpose of a $5 USD Pi, but sustainability is still cool, for those of us willing to pay 3x the price or whatever.

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