The business arm of Raspberry Pi is preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO) in London. CEO Eben Upton tells Ars that should the IPO happen, it will let Raspberry Pi’s not-for-profit side expand by “at least a factor of 2X.” And while it’s “an understandable thing” that Raspberry Pi enthusiasts could be concerned, “while I’m involved in running the thing, I don’t expect people to see any change in how we do things.”
All I know is that basically every IPO I’ve seen has eventually made the product worse. I have no data to back this up, just feelings, but still. As soon as a company starts worrying about shareholders, corners start getting cut or prices start going up for no reason.
Straight up this has me concerned for the same reason
Once a company becomes beholden to shareholders that’s literally the goal
More of the same here. This is extremely depressing news.
It sucks that running a successful business can never be enough.
Prepare for Pi to start going closed source and fighting against “copycat” SBC boards. It’ll take a generation to see the enshittification set in, but Orange Pi and other similar projects are going to be the winners in a strictly profit based comparison.
I can’t wait to have to pay a subscription fee for some aspect of it.
Those are the best two examples that come to my mind. Both were great until they IPO’d.
The problem, as I see it, with IPO’s is that the company becomes beholden to shareholders who care nothing for the product, and only for the profit. Quality and profit are fairly mutually exclusive these days.
Reddit hasn’t gone public just yet
Sometimes you have to pre-suck to show investors you are serious about dismantling your company so they can feed on the corpse.
build something, IPO and cash out, then wall st. vultures suck all the value out of it
It’s not that quality and profit are mutually exclusive - look at valve, Wegmans… Fuck the list of well known companies I can think of off the top of my head is pretty short.
But you can be plenty profitable and produce quality products, with ethical business practices no less.
Exponential growth is what’s incompatible with quality. And taking the money is what sets you on the path - when you take investments, you’re trapped. Eventually, you’re going to have to IPO, and every step of the way they’ll be pushing you to take more investments, more loans, reinvest it in growth… Because if you explode overnight they’ll make 100 or 1000x their investment, and if not you can sell off your future to look good for your IPO, and they’ll still make a ton of money.
And if you fail? Well, venture capitalism is the scratch off of investments… It’s high risk high reward, one big winner makes up for all the losers - a modest win barely competes with far safer investments
Google IPO’d back in 2004. Do you really consider that to be the pivotal point in Google’s history?
Reddit hasn’t even IPO’d yet.
Going IPO does not immediately turn a company evil. That’s something that happens over time, because of being beholden to so many shareholders who only care about profit.
Reddit hasn’t even IPO’d yet.
Reddit has been making many user-detrimental changes in preparation for their IPO.
When they are private they still have shareholders, the shares are just not available to the public. When it goes public is when some of those private shareholders want to cash out. So they drive the fundamentals however and sell the stock over the next years.
I believe that being publicly traded means that you are obligated to maximize shareholder returns, whereas a privately-held company can have literally any goals, as long as it pays taxes and follows the law.
Yes but that part is not exactly as strong as you portray. The BOD has the power to decide what to do and how to do it, so they can decide on pretty much anything and say it’s for long term return. They can decide on doing more environmentally, DEI, ESG, the rarely seen good wages, keep manufacturing in the west, donations, whatever. They have pretty much complete leeway and can always say it’s for long term return. Also the main (only?) way for the shareholder return obligation to play out is a class action lawsuit by the shareholders, who they are the majority of. (You may hear about it a lot because the far right is trying to rely on this idea to prevent companies from doing anything they don’t like.)
Yep. Inevitably, when this happens, stock price manipulation becomes the core business.
If people think that an IPO means we’re going to … push prices up, push the margins up, push down the feature sets, the only answer we can give is, watch us. Keep watching," he said. “Let’s look at it in 15, 20 years’ time.”
What a fucking lame answer.
RasPi was cool at one time, but that time has long since passed.
When their focus changed to more corporate aligned interests they became less cool. Victims of their own success I’d guess.
But this a politician’s answer. They just didn’t answer the question at all but implied that if we check back in 15 years we’d see that they had “our” best interests at heart.
Um no company has your back. They are all in it to make as much money as possible. I mean I don’t blame them but I don’t trust the em either.
I do blame them. Success does not require obscene profit. A company like that can actually be both successful and not sell themselves out like that.
If profit is a company’s only motive, then I’m sorry, but that company has no real value or purpose.
Lol, right?
The sheer ego to tell your customers to reserve judgement on a massive, company changing event for over a fucking decade! Delusional.
Especially when they’ve been completely beat out in their market niche for ages and are now only holding on due to brand recognition. It’s easy to have grass roots community support when you were the only product in your niche, but they’ve been coasting on that for ages with no real work to truly stay relevant.
What features are you referring to?
There are other cheaper boards with better specs.
And actual availability at MSRP prices
“…watch us [do exactly that]. Keep watching [as we do exactly that and worse]. Let’s look at it in 15, 20 years’ time [long after I’ve cut and run with my golden parachute and left the rotting corpse of this company get picked apart by vulture investors and am long past caring]”
This is the same answer always given by every sell-out right before they sell out their users/customers, and it always collapses into a silent capitulation to enshittification not long thereafter.
To customers/users of a product or service, IPO should mean only one thing: Last call; FLEE NOW!
They were definitely a pioneer in the SBC market. But there are tons of alternatives out there nowadays. And if you are amenable to upcycling, you can get old 1L-class x86 machines from enterprise companies doing dump/replace cycles for dirt cheap on eBay or Craigslist or FB marketplace.
TL;DR: yes it’s frustrating to see. But as consumers, we have tons of options these days, so it’s not really a catastrophic loss even if Rpi goes down the enshittification path.
“I don’t expect to see any change in how we do things.”
Oh, this is going to age like fucking milk. You belong to the shareholders now, mate. They’ll MAKE you change how you do things, and you’ll love it.
What do we want?
_More profit! _ When do we want it?
Now!
I was already planning on never buying another Pi based on how they fucked over consumers in favor of business customers during the shortages. This only reinforces it. Companies going public irreversibly eradicates any and all consumer value in favor of shareholders and I do not support any company that actively chooses that path. Fuck 'em. I’ll just buy random chinese SBC’s instead…
Exactly where I’m at, hearing this news. Chasing growth in profit at the expense of everything is a sure way to ruin a good product. I’m already not a fan of the Pi 5 being so expensive. I thought the goal was extremely cheap, low performance computing. The idea of a functional desktop computer for $30 was kind of seismic. I guess we still have the zero.
For the record I’m not for the IPO.
Working in hardware, this is a shit take. If you’re saying a hobbiest should be prioritized over keeping a paycheck coming to employees at a firm that rely on rpi parts being delivered, umm…
WITH priority as a giant customer (not with rpi, but multi billion accounts) we still were facing 72+ week lead times for components. A smaller company, more likely to use an rpi as an integral part of their widget, would be facing MUCH longer. That means manufacturing halt, and going under.
Should they have taken on industrial costumers in the first place? That’s another question. But to say my octopi server has priority over someone being able to feed their family is bullshit. Not only that but industry customers keep volumes high, allowing for lower end prices.
My very honest opinion is that Raspberry Pi’s should be for consumers only. They should not be a product enterprises use. They were originally a cheap and affordable solution to hobbyists needs of getting some minimal amount of compute power in a very limited space. They were not thought up to be bought by the dozens, almost hundreds, for corporations who cram them into a cluster and make a server out of it (I have seen that at my workplace).
Much like there are corporate only products imo there should be consumer only products and Raspberry Pi’s should have very firmly made an effort to stay a consumer only product.
And even in the current situation, yeah they should have prioritized hobbyists. Businesses making themselves reliant on one single irreplaceable part from one single manufacturer in their supply chain have no one to blame but themselves when it comes back to bite them in the ass. That kind of setup is bad business no matter how you look at it and should not exist past a prototype stage unless you’re in the business of gambling.
Sole sourcing of ASICs is a necessity of life unfortunately. They’re rarely pin-for-pin compatible, and hardware doesn’t allow quick spins due to regulatory recertifications any time you touch the PCB.
If your widget needs a computer in a small form factor, you can’t do much better than a pi. Not many firms have expertise of high-speed-design, so off the shelf hardware to handle that portion is pretty much a given. The fact it has exposed and broken out GPIO crowns it really as the only option in the world of SFF PCs. Arduino-class products are microcontrollers, the ATmega328P that powers them is an extremely basic MCU borrowed from industry.
For reference the least expensive industrial pc is $160 on digikey. The other SBCs are from non-reliable brands without certs, volume, etc. Rockchip based designs are going to be a no-go for many due to security implications, however imagined they may be.
These industrial customers may have started off a decade ago as a hobbiest on the pi; their volumes ultimately keep prices down for the hobbiest.
their volumes ultimately keep prices down for the hobbiest.
true, if you can’t get a Pi due to corporations sucking the supply dry you will save 100% of the money otherwise spent on a Pi.
Be real, all electronics supply dropped to a trickle. Even if they sent them all into the channel it still would have suffered from the same dipshits scalping.
See the other hot consumer devices: ps5, nvidia 1080/2080s, Nintendo switch (even approaching 7 years old)…
Shit, I couldn’t even get an SD card for a bit.
I don’t think you understand how bad the supply chain problems got. Our vendors struggled to get fab time. When they did get wafers scheduled they had to choose which of their dies to print. When they had dies cut from the wafers, they couldn’t get packing to bond the dies into. And that’s one company. Try to align that to 10s to 100s of suppliers and their portfolios. None of those companies are focusing on their low margin devices, such as what you’d find in consumer facing devices. We had to idle our production for months across multiple product lines because of a single $0.75 chip that doesn’t have an equivalent (see above regarding ASICs). These issues finally subsided by the end of last year and have cemented a bit of patience in me that I did not have before the pandemic.
It’s not even about the paycheck though- because we are assuming that all units shipped are being sold at the same MSRP. It wouldn’t matter who they sold to, they were gonna get paid the same regardless of buyer if they were selling more than they could produce.
A simple way to handle the shortage would just be to ship first to order, first to ship. But no, Pi outright said they would not ship to consumers, only corporate customers, until the shortage ended. That is what burned up my goodwill, because it proves they don’t actually care about any open source community farther than their wallet can be thrown. The IPO only reinforces that greed motive, and I will not be buying their products.
Again, I’m against the IPO. Never brings good.
I don’t disagree with your points re:fairness and the community goodwill.
I think they still are the only game in town for my usecases. The support and “just works” factor is unmatched.
And with the Hock Tan era Broadcom, you’re not going to see another bcm based design upstart.
Hopefully RISC-V can ramp up and provide a viable alternative in the near term, with an AMD or something willing to provide some resources.
I personally don’t know of any company that has gotten better post-IPO than they were before. Would be enlightening it if anyone could suggest examples or personal anecdotes.
I’ve prepared for you a comprehensive list, here:
That’s a wholly complete list indeed. Must have been tough to put together /s
Reddit
No change in current focus, which happens to be the business sector. :)
Eben Upton has always been a pile of dog shit. If his mouth is open, he’s lying.
Back when the first Pi was released, it only had 256mb of memory. He came by our hackerspace to promote the Pi, and swore up and down to us all that no updates were coming down the pipe, that it was safe to buy a Pi from him right then, and we weren’t gonna be missing out on anything.
1 week later, they announced all Pis were going to come with 512mb of ram by default, no price increase.
Fuck him. Fuck his stupid face. Never trust a word this dipshit says.
So he unloaded all the unsellable 256mb stock to a bunch of nerds? That’s just good business sense. Man could be president some day.
Welp time to move on from Raspberry Pi.
the single board computer market has came far since them.
Probably why they’re cashing out now.
It really has, for most uses there are better boards
I wouldn’t necessarily read too much into this.
I think most people’s aversions to the concept of IPOs stems from the fact that it lies at the end of the not-too-uncommon lifecycle of VC-backed companies:
- Get VC investment
- Subsidize your product using said investment
- Grow like hell on account of handing out things at a too-low price
- Prepare for IPO by worsening the deal for customers to improve financials (also known as enshittification)
- Use IPO money to pay off VCs and leave both them and founders with a large chunk of money
Post-IPO the company has to abide by the regular rules of being a company, meaning that they never really re-capture what it was like when they had a large stack of free money to make all deals sweeter than the competition.
All this to say is that the damage is done once you raise VC capital. Raspberry Pi has raised one fairly small round, so there’s potentially some damage done there, but it’s way less than your average tech startup did throughout the years, so this doesn’t necessarily have to mean that everything will go to hell now.
Thanks for explaining the cycle, my assumption was that bringing in board members is what ruins everything.
No, going overnight from running at a massive loss to “time to make loads of cash” is what ruins everything.
while I’m involved
I guess that’s the best one can hope for in top-down corporations. I wish they’d make it a workers’ co-op for their and the community’s long term sake but who am I kidding… 🥲
Probably a radical opinion but I think all businesses should be worker co-ops. Doubt it would fix everything but it would be a good start
We’re all comrades here. They are positioned better than many to do this given their mission, reputation and so on.
How long before he is no longer involved? It could be sooner than he thinks, who knows.
Well, I guess I’ve bought my last pi then, was nice while it lasted
RIP Raspberry Pi
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So, when Raspberry Pi is inevitably enshitified if they go through with this, who’s gonna be the next big (rather, small) company to get something Pi equivalent to run an OS like Lakka or Recalbox?
I honestly don’t know since I don’t know of any other companies making these kinds of mini computers.
There are plenty of alternative SBCs out there, many mimicking the RPi form factor as well. Look into Radxa, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, Pine64, ODROID, etc. I picked up an Indiedroid Nova board last year that is RPi form factor but has the more powerful RK3588 processor. Drivers are still WIP but it is quite fast. I also run my home server on a Radxa Rock Pi 4, which has an RK3399 processor and is very comparable to the RPi 4. Drivers for it are pretty solid these days and it doesn’t require extra work to set up. Just download an Armbian image and go.
Any non-rockchip ones tho? Beagle has been dead for a bit.
Pretty much all the alternative SBCs are either Rockchip or Allwinner if you want ARM. There are a few RISC-V SBCs now but software support isn’t as solid and many of these lack GPUs. There are also a few x86/64 SBCs based on either older Intel Atom or newer mobile parts too.
Yea in one of my other comments down somewhere here I mentioned riscv as a hopeful future option, maybe with someone like AMD spending some resources to bring another viable solution to market. I know AMD is working on RISCV, they’ve got some low power SOCs already. I’m wondering if they got something in the pipes…
There are literally dozens of alternative products to the Raspberry Pi, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Do a web search for “single board computer” or even just “raspberry pi alternatives”, and see for yourself.
Fair enough.
SBCs are a fairly mature space nowadays. Plenty of options.
RIP RPI
