[HN Gopher] Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and...
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Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
Author : kevinbowman
Score : 188 points
Date : 2021-05-25 16:38 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.adafruit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.adafruit.com)
| BoysenberryPi wrote:
| Huge fan of Hackaday so I'm really not with this acquisition but
| if you offer me 700,000,000 for my blog I'd sell it too. I wish
| them the best of luck.
| Zenst wrote:
| Not just the blog but Tindie as well all under the
| umbrella(Supplyframe) they brought for $0.7m. "The expected
| revenue of Supplyframe for the fiscal year 2021 is around $70
| million with profit margins typical for the software business."
| sure does make for a different perspective upon the offer and
| on the basis of that, along with the growth in that area of
| hobby electronics. I figure for the buyer, it's a bargain and
| on the face of it, could of sold for more.
|
| [EDIT ADD} OK been pointed out I slipped few points on that
| value and it's $700m which with that turnover makes way more
| sense. But epic Doh moment and hands up on that laugh.
| elromulous wrote:
| $0.7b*!
| Zenst wrote:
| Thank you - added an edit in time, epic brain fart upon my
| part that and certainly makes the price with the turnover
| balance out more as a much fairer deal.
| robert_foss wrote:
| That's all very unfortunate. Having worked with German behemoth
| companies before I can't think of any positive outcomes.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Eh, no need to be that narrow: What fraction of _all_
| acquisitions end well for the acquired company? I 'm sure it
| must happen, but (at the risk of availability bias) I can't
| actually think of any.
| somethingwitty1 wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by "well for the acquired company".
| But if you just mean where the product (or possibly even the
| brand) went on to be successful, a bunch jump to mind: Pixar,
| Marvel, Google Maps, Ring, Zappos, Android, Woot!, Gatorade.
| ptorrone wrote:
| i will be interviewing the team at siemens and maybe some of the
| folks at supplyframe / hackaday / tindie -- post up any questions
| you want me to ask (disclosure: i started hackaday 16 years ago
| or so, have nothing to do with this now).
| dclaw wrote:
| Extremely disappointing. Siemens has no business owning or
| purchasing these sites. Shame on Supplyframe.
| grammarprofess wrote:
| It actually makes alot of sense, Siemens and supplyframe will
| tremendously benefit from this!
| jsilence wrote:
| Care to detail why and how? Genuinly interested.
| sabjut wrote:
| What are your reasons to assume that Siemens would mismanage
| these sites?
| rjzzleep wrote:
| It's one of these typical German conglomerates that
| absolutely doesn't understand consumer and consumer products.
| I don't know if it will mismanage Hackaday. They literally
| only have to keep it as is. But if they don't(mismanage) I'll
| be positively surprised.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Their twitter messages quoted in the Adafruit blog imply
| that they don't know what they bought :-)
|
| "Thank you for reaching out @adafruit. @Hackaday und
| @Tindie are websites of @Supplyframe, and thus also part of
| the acquisition. Hackaday in particular is a community
| exchange website for engineers and developers. "
|
| (no need to explain what Hackaday is to Adafruit.. probably
| they don't know who Adafruit is either.)
| cosmie wrote:
| Seems more like an innocent mix-up by the social media PR
| person, who likely isn't familiar enough with the
| properties to notice the mixup between Hackaday and
| Tindie at the end there.
|
| Or they could have been referring to Hackaday.io rather
| than hackaday.com.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| That's exactly the problem. The Siemens Press Office
| employee doesn't have the domain knowledge of what
| Adafruit and Hackaday are that would be common knowledge
| to end users of their products, or would be if they, like
| their users would, bothered to do a cursory search before
| replying.
|
| These German megacorps put so much procedure and so many
| layers between the people who build stuff and the people
| who use it that it's impenetrable. You can get a Siemens
| sales guy in the office by just mentioning you might buy
| something, but when he gets there he can only parrot the
| information off the glossy brochures. You have to go
| through him to talk to the applications engineer. The
| apps engineer has a cursory knowledge of typical uses of
| the product, but when you actually need some details,
| they have to call their technicians in the lab. That tech
| can try it but can't offer any guarantees it will
| continue to work, they'll have their manager contact a
| manager of the domestic Siemens engineering office, at
| which point you finally get to the guy who worked on that
| product. But it turns out he only translated the English
| version of the manual, there's no way to reach the guy
| who wrote the original in German.
|
| The inevitable result of all that communication friction
| just to answer a basic question is that the company
| representatives can't tell a good idea from BS. You need
| that to keep scams off of Tindie, submarine marketing and
| pseudoscience off of Hackaday, and in general build stuff
| better than the discrete companies that the megacorp
| slowly amalgamated.
| ptorrone wrote:
| i'll be interviewing them, so please let me know if there
| are any specific questions you want asked.
| ornornor wrote:
| I'd be curious to know what Siemens' plans are for HaD,
| if they're looking to monetize it or just keep it as is.
| Basically I want to know how long it'll be before HaD is
| ruined. I still hope it won't be because I love HaD but
| it really doesn't look good. When has such a corporate
| takeover ever gone well for the product?
| atatatat wrote:
| This seems like a good place to ask: who's interested in
| building a competitor?
| kasbah wrote:
| Not a direct competitor but https://kitspace.org is my
| take on electronics project sharing. Feel free to get in
| touch if you are interested in taking part.
| rasz wrote:
| Ask Hackaday staff/management if they installed FAX
| machine yet, and typewriters. Half not joking.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you offered me 10x sales and $0.7B for a company I owned or
| managed, I'd absolutely take it and I don't blame Supplyframe
| in the least for selling.
|
| How Siemens plans to get that value out is utterly beyond me,
| so I'd have some questions on the buyer side, but the seller
| side makes 100% sense to me.
| libria wrote:
| I'm not sure they feel ashamed or should; USD 0.7 billion
| solves a lot of problems for the owners/employees.
|
| What was your offer?
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| I doubt it solves a lot of problems for the employees
| duckfang wrote:
| > I'm not sure they feel ashamed or should; USD 0.7 billion
| solves a lot of problems for the owners/employees.
|
| Selling a company ALMOST NEVER benefits the employees.
|
| It ALMOST ALWAYS benefits the owners who sell.
|
| And giving the snarky AF comment of "What was your offer?" is
| asinine and you should be ashamed of even going there.
| kragen wrote:
| Most high-tech startups have a significant percentage of
| their stock held by their employees, though I don't know if
| that was the case here; Torrone's note about hackaday's
| history suggests otherwise.
| timdiggerm wrote:
| You've conflated might with right, I think. It's pretty clear
| the comment you're replying to was not judging this on
| financial terms.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| It's odd that my side project is now being sold by Siemens. What
| will happen if I start selling motion controllers (or other
| things that compete with Siemens) on there?
|
| On the plus side, maybe they can expand the payment options
| beyond Paypal.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This is great news for Supplyframe.
|
| But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some
| introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work.
|
| Let'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/Tandy/Dick
| Smiths/Marples(sp?)), a host of retail outlets, and several
| equipment manufacturers selling into the market.
|
| In the "modern" 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.
|
| So why is this? I suspect that a large chunk of that is money. In
| particular, the "cost" 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'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.)
|
| 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.
|
| 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 "exposure." (cue the Oatmeal
| comic on spending "exposure").
|
| There are some standouts, like Adafruit, but even there the
| margins are tight and the operations are small. They are
| certainly not a "Radio Shack" level of enterprise.
|
| I don't know what the "fix" 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 "maker movement" work. Or it will
| continue to struggle.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I disagree with your take on the "makers" market. The maker
| world is far more interesting today than in 1985.
|
| Yes, there are no "brick and mortar" 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't need brick and mortar stores.
| The experience of shopping for parts online is much better than
| at a Radioshack -- it'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 _today_ which sometimes sucks but that 's
| life. We don't need 6 magazines anymore because people put
| their code on Github and their projects on YouTube, and for
| _free_. Profits in the industry are probably lower but that 's
| because there'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.
|
| 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't be bought, and if there'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's homebrewing controller the maker world is really
| bursting with success.
| kragen wrote:
| 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's columns out to the teeming unwashed masses. Now
| Don just posts them on
| https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu21.shtml#05.23.21 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.)
|
| I don't know how much Don spends on hosting+ to make
| _everything he 's ever written instantly available to every
| hacker in the whole world_ but I'm guessing it's about US$100
| a month. Inflation-adjusted, that's probably less than
| Popular Electronics Magazine spent running the office
| coffeepot. Not counting the price of the coffee.
|
| He's written about the days Chuck is--wrongly, I think--
| eulogizing in https://www.tinaja.com/glib/waywere.pdf.
|
| 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's hands; it's access to knowledge and tools, and the
| power to create that access unlocks. It's people dreaming of
| wonderful things that never were, and making them real. It's
| human flourishing.
|
| So, how are we doing on that?
|
| ______
|
| + Unlike people who just host on GitHub, who depend on
| Microsoft's continued goodwill to foot their publishing bill,
| Don hosts his own pages.
| antattack wrote:
| Hobbyist money is still flowing, but most of it goes directly
| to China.
| michaelt wrote:
| I suspect hobby electronics has faced stiff competition from
| hobby computing, among people inclined towards tinkering.
|
| The people who, in the 1980s might have been using a 555 timer
| to blink an LED? These days they've got a computer, and they're
| making a web page or writing 'hello world' in javascript.
|
| Oh sure, a few of them might get an Arduino and blink an LED
| from time to time - but nowhere near enough to support high
| street component stores.
|
| Of course, from a certain perspective hobby electronics has
| never been better. Component stockists with huge ranges and
| fast, cheap shipping? Professionally produced PCBs for $5
| including shipping? Microcontrollers with built-in wifi for $1?
| And the compilers and dev tools are all free? Some of these
| things have never been better :)
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > I suspect that a large chunk of that is money. In particular,
| the "cost" 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't changed.
|
| I believe this is a case of "cost disease", when the labor in
| one sector continues to get more expensive without matching
| productivity gains.
| genmud wrote:
| I am actually not sure I 100% agree with that take on it.
|
| I would argue that much of the sales of 1975-1985 places like
| Radio Shack/Tandy/etc. were around early adopters of home
| computing. And I would also assume that the vast majority of
| the sales/items they had were finished projects, not "maker
| market" type of stuff. Many of the magazines of that era are
| "how to build $x for your home" or "program $y".
|
| I would say that what we are seeing is the market getting much
| more mature and specialized rather than the makers market going
| away. I don't think it was ever big enough to be sustainable to
| begin with, it just so happened that products required bits
| here and there that those companies had any volume from the
| general public on maker type of stuff.
| worldmerge wrote:
| I miss going to my local Radio Shack and getting components.
| When they went under I could really only get components online.
| Sure, there is a commercial supplier near me but they are only
| open 9-5ish M-F and don't have a website. It would be great if
| they were able to digitize their inventory and ship orders. I
| wonder why some commercial focused companies make it so hard
| for non-commercial customers to access their business (I'm
| including companies that have websites but make it clear they
| only sell to contractors)?
| ajdude wrote:
| I had this very same issue yesterday. I needed one particular
| component now, not "x days from now, Online." I knew it was
| something that radio shack would have had, but I had to drive
| an hour and a half to the closest microcenter.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > I wonder why some commercial focused companies make it so
| hard for non-commercial customers to access their business
| (I'm including companies that have websites but make it clear
| they only sell to contractors)?
|
| Too much effort for too little revenue. The probability of a
| customer spending only $50, but also needing 2 hours of
| customer service might be too high. Once you engage in a
| transaction with someone, there's a lot of possible future
| liability that comes with it.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Entry level consumers tend to be complicated. People order
| the wrong part and want a return, or drop an order after
| they're provided an invoice. It's just easier if you're a
| very small shop to cater towards the straightforward
| customers
| adolph wrote:
| I don't think this is universally right about brick and mortar.
| I don't remember MicroCenter having a RadioShack-like section
| before but it is there now with a bunch of Adafruit, Raspberry,
| Pimori, BBC Microbit, etc. In a large metro like Houston, there
| are also local stores like EPO and regional chains like Altex.
| I can see how smaller metro areas can't support the same actual
| stores as before, but online serves the long tails of
| specialized demand and supply better anyway.
|
| https://epohouston.com/
|
| https://www.altex.com/Tech-Supplies/Electronic-Parts/Mechani...
| kiba wrote:
| Is 33 million dollars of revenue per year considered small?
| maxerickson wrote:
| A single fast food place might have several million dollars
| of revenue.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| > like Adafruit, but even there the margins are tight and the
| operations are small
|
| I'm surprised, Adafruit has a 50-100% markup on most items
| compared to Aliexpress/other Chinese electronics.
| ta988 wrote:
| Yes, but you get it fast, with service and no random customs
| problems. Sometimes for things that don't scale ($20 vs $10
| one time) it may not matter much for some.
| skybrian wrote:
| I assume Adafruit is fast for people on the east coast or
| if you pay a lot for shipping. I looked into Adafruit's
| west coast distributors but they only have a few of their
| products. (Jameco carries some Adafruit stuff but typically
| not what I'm looking for.)
| max-ibel wrote:
| I guess that's the point being made by ancestor comments:
| When prices are that low, it's hard to make enough to support
| a large operation for (relatively) low volume, even if
| individual margins are high.
|
| Plus, until recently, you could order things from aliexpress
| or banggood etc. at low Chinese prices and not even pay
| shipping (that was essentially free).
| lakala6790 wrote:
| 100% markup is keystone for retailers; anything less than
| that is tight margins.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Honestly with the prices on Ali or even eBay-direct-from-
| China-shipping it seems rather glaringly obvious that there
| are huge externalities attached to all of this.
|
| Personally, I was never hugely into the connecting devboards
| together style of work (which is of course the fastest/best
| way to get results), which is pretty much only possible with
| "1 $ style" devboards, because eval boards have never been
| single-dollar items. I usually handwire everything or roll my
| own PCBs. I try to be conscious with component selection, if
| I can get components made in first-world countries I will pay
| the usually higher (1.5-3x) price tag for that. This is
| however somewhat difficult, because the country of origin is
| often hard to find out for components (and weirdly enough,
| many manufacturers are pretty quiet about it, even when it's
| made in the EU, Germany, UK, ...). It's a hobby, I don't
| really need to count pennies.
| ahmedalsudani wrote:
| It's a different world of smartphones and apps.
|
| Not to say that your lamentation for what's lost is invalid,
| but you'll find some incredible people on those new platforms.
| Check out Jeremy Fielding, Machine Thinking, AvE, and many
| others on YouTube.
|
| We have lost, and we have gained.
| ptorrone wrote:
| i will be interviewing them, so if there are any questions you
| want me to ask, feel free to post them here.
|
| (i work at adafruit, founded hackaday)
| PavleMiha wrote:
| Purely anecdotally it looks to me that a lot of it moved to
| (pretty profitable) youtube channels, all the way from Mark
| Roper, to Applied Science, Simone Giertz, Michael Reeves, etc.
| kragen wrote:
| Ben Krasnow and Simone Giertz are pretty great, but they're
| _hackers_ : the kind of people who used to _shop at_ Radio
| Shack and read Modern Electronics. There 's a world of
| difference between watching Simone Giertz build hilarious
| contraptions and building those contraptions yourself.
|
| Chuck is saying that 40 years ago there were _so many
| hackers_ doing these things that there was a whole workforce
| --partly, but not entirely, a hacker workforce--selling them
| what they needed for their arcane hobbies. And that, today,
| there isn 't.
|
| You seem to suggest that average teenage wankers watching
| Simone Giertz's escapades is roughly equivalent to 01980s
| hackers buying transistors at Radio Shack to build a walkie-
| talkie out of. They aren't. Watching a video of someone doing
| something is completely different from doing it yourself.
| rasz wrote:
| Whole workforce supplying hackers is still here and
| thriving, its just based in Shenzhen.
| kragen wrote:
| Shenzhen (and Taipei, Wuxi, etc.) supplies the
| electronics for the entire world economy, which it turns
| out is mostly boring incompetent greyface stuff like
| General Motors and Cemex. They supply hackers too, but
| hackers are a minority of their customer base. Shenzhen's
| customer base isn't comparable to that of Radio Shack or
| Byte.
| croes wrote:
| The Siemens that has attracted attention in recent years mainly
| because of job cuts and bribe payments? Good night Hackaday.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Move seems to be part of that steam for
| (home/industrial)-automation plan?
|
| Probably doomed. German industry culture is toxic to software.
| Product perfectionism prevents shipping early and often, often
| doesen't ship at all, cause hype dies before product is done.
| zwieback wrote:
| It's always interesting to me what kind of stuff Siemens gets
| into these days. My grandpa was a Siemens lifer building power
| plants and actually lived in Siemensstadt before and during WWII.
|
| Hard to imagine what the connection to hobby electronics is.
| kragen wrote:
| Siemens makes an enormous range of electrical and electronic
| products. One of my favorite YouChube channels, Homo Faciens,
| used to have a lot of really great stuff about improvising
| electromechanical systems out of junk, but more recently it's
| been shilling Siemens products that replace the junk he used to
| use. So apparently if you're into that kind of thing, Siemens
| has a lot of products to sell you.
|
| It's a shame SupplyFrame wasn't profitable enough to remain
| independent, but as acquirers go, Siemens seems pretty
| reasonable.
| baybal2 wrote:
| I wounder why? $0.7B for a blog, and a wordpress shop?
|
| Cheap money make "miracles" these days.
| progre wrote:
| I think they are buying because of the audience.
| smarx007 wrote:
| https://supplyframe.com/why-supplyframe/ 70+ websites and a
| SaaS supply chain management intelligence software (Design-to-
| Source Intelligence as they call it) that nets $70M revenue
| annually...
| baybal2 wrote:
| $700M for $70M? I'd say it's still a very jaw dropping deal
| mediaman wrote:
| 10x sales isn't crazy for a growing, high margin recurring
| revenue SaaS business in today's environment.
| bsder wrote:
| That's actually about dead on. 10x run rate is the business
| school valuation.
| luma wrote:
| As a Tindie seller, I have hopes that this injection of cash will
| address several outstanding issues with the platform.
|
| I sell a DIY touchscreen home automation controller that I build
| by hand in my basement[1]. My product is targeted at DIY types
| interested in owning their own home automation environment. The
| project utilizes a 3D printed enclosure, a custom PCB, an
| ESP8266, Nextion LCD, and a few supporting components, fasteners,
| etc. All firmware, gerbers, STLs, etc are open source and
| available on GitHub[2].
|
| I didn't really intend to sell these things, but several
| interested users who didn't have access to the required tools or
| skills talked me into listing on Tindie. It is a great platform
| for my use case - basically zero friction to get a simple store
| stood up and to start collecting orders. There is nearly no
| customization possible, you simply upload some markdown, setup
| your products, then add your PayPal info to collect payments.
|
| Over the years, users have been requesting (seemingly simple)
| features to be added to the platform. For example, the Tindi API
| is a read-only affair. You can collect your orders via the API,
| but once you've shipped them, you cannot use the API to mark the
| order shipped (or provide tracking info, etc). User requests for
| this functionality have been made going back to 2015, and nearly
| immediately, statements were made that an "API v2" was coming
| "soon". You can request beta API access, but in my case that
| request went unanswered and no others have suggested that their
| access was granted either. 6 years later, there is still no way
| to mark an order shipped without clicking around in the web UI.
|
| More concerning has been the lack of any ability to deal with
| taxes. US law now requires that I collect and pay state sales
| tax, but Tindie can't handle it and shows no sign of ever adding
| that feature. The list goes on, no way to handle UK VAT post-
| brexit, no ability to utilize payment providers besides PayPal,
| etc etc. Each request is met with "we're working on it", but in
| the 3 years that I've been selling on Tindie, I've never once
| noticed any new features added to the platform and no community
| announcements to that effect have ever been made.
|
| There is allegedly a development team behind this, but there is
| zero outward indication of any product development happening at
| all.
|
| Hopefully a cash injection might get Tindie up to modern
| standards for a web store. I love the ethos behind the product,
| but the product itself is severely lacking.
|
| Hopefully, $700M will help move this platform forward.
|
| [1] https://www.tindie.com/products/luma/ha-switchplate-hasp-
| sin... [2] https://github.com/HASwitchPlate/HASPone
| kragen wrote:
| > _I sell a DIY touchscreen home automation controller that I
| build by hand in my basement[1]._
|
| This sounds like a disruptive competitor to existing Siemens
| product lines (50% of the functionality for 5% of the price).
| Maybe your best hope is that Siemens management doesn't notice
| that Tindie is a sales channel for things like this.
| moolcool wrote:
| I hope hackaday manages to stay around. They're the only blog I
| know which has maintained a high quality though all of these
| years and through many different owners.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Yeah, it's a truly useful resource. They showcase so many cool
| projects it inspired me to get into hardware hacking.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Which can be claimed for their content but not for their UI
| ddingus wrote:
| What do you mean? The UI is fine. The better part of it
| happens to be the fact that they haven't messed with it.
| gertlex wrote:
| Maybe parent is still salty about the UI change... several
| years ago.
|
| I remember not being happy but that's no longer the case
| for me... but I also don't read it regularly.
|
| What I'd miss most is if the hackaday.io project site were
| to go away. Makes documenting my projects very easy.
| capableweb wrote:
| What's wrong with their UI? Using
| https://hackaday.com/2021/05/22/irc-will-never-die/ as an
| example
|
| Seems the contrast is excellent and no obvious disturbing
| layout choices. Fairly traditional layout although I'm not a
| fan of the white on black as I sit in the sun a lot, but
| generally it seems quite good if you compare it with most
| random blogs out there.
| luke2m wrote:
| I just use their RSS feed, but the UI looks fine to me.
| neolog wrote:
| Don't mess with the UI please. It's simple like it should be.
| causality0 wrote:
| Hackaday definitely earned its spot on my daily reader list.
| It's especially good lately since they seem to have stopped
| running clickbait and "trendy" articles. The word
| "technoshamanism" still makes me gag.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| Their podcast is quite good as well. Check it out if you
| haven't.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I hope so too! I've been a (semi-) regular reader for just over
| a decade now, and they are a wealth of information and
| inspiration.
|
| The only thing I might change would be the lack of edit/delete
| in the comments section (every time I read comments on there
| somebody seems to be asking mods to delete a duplicate comment,
| etc). I can't really complain, at least they didn't use some
| heavy, potentially data-sucking third party comment platform
| like FB or Disqus. I assume it's some kind of WordPress plugin,
| but I haven't looked into it.
| [deleted]
| satya71 wrote:
| Didn't realize Hackaday and Tindie were making $70m in revenue.
| Siemens seems to have good track record in other acquisitions in
| EE space. I guess they're trying to go up against Arrow, Avnet,
| etc
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Funny things about Arrow and Avnet- they both started as
| hobbyist stores in Manhattan's "Radio Row" back when radio was
| the hot new technology:
|
| https://www.arrow.com/fiveyearsout/company-overview/history
|
| https://www.radiodiaries.org/new-podcast-radio-row/
| drone wrote:
| They're not. SupplyFrame has traditionally been a software
| vendor for companies in the electronics manufacturing space.
| The blogs and Tindie are a very, very small part of their
| portfolio.
|
| For example, there's QuoteFX, DirectSource, DesignSense,
| FindChips, and a host of other solutions they sell.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Siemens likely doesn't care at all about and may not even be
| aware of Hackaday. Wouldn't it be fairly easy to restart Hackaday
| elsewhere if Siemens chooses to defund it?
| [deleted]
| tpmx wrote:
| Wow. This is so doomed to fail. German bigcorp with a faked
| startup culture unit ingesting Hackaday/Tindie.
|
| Congrats to the sellers.
| renw0rp wrote:
| a bit historical story:
|
| In 1993 Siemens bought Polish early computer manufacturer:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwro
|
| it seems just to close it down
| [deleted]
| ldite wrote:
| Yeah. I worked for a tech company that was acquired by Siemens.
| It didn't go well.
| NockNock wrote:
| Can I ask why? Or what company?
| rasz wrote:
| In 1993 Siemens acquired ELWRO, Polish computer
| manufacturer (RIAD - IBM 360/370 mainframe clones for
| Russian/Indian market) and ZWUT, Polish telecommunication
| equipment manufacturer. They paid $38mln. First thing they
| did was to fire everyone from ELWRO. They also send
| manufacturing lines and unused parts stock back to Germany,
| and on top of it demolished manufacturing plants and sold
| off bare land. Good old German efficiency, scorched earth
| policy. 7 years later Siemens finished this "investment" by
| selling remaining telecomm part of the company to US
| investor Telect who planned to manufacture fiberoptic
| switches in Poland. Rumor has it Telect came to some sort
| of a deal with Nortel and closed manufacturing in Eastern
| Europe as a result.
|
| And that was that, from Mainframe manufacturer to nothing
| in 7 years from Siemens acquisition.
| iagovar wrote:
| Great investment.
| tpmx wrote:
| Siemens buying a USSR-era IBM mainframe _hardware_ clone
| manufacturing company ~28 years ago for a relatively
| small amount of money and then failing to do something
| useful with it seems very different from this story.
| mdoms wrote:
| I have two questions which aren't answered in the article and
| seem like they should be,
|
| * What's Hackaday?
|
| * What's Tindie?
| croes wrote:
| Let me help you
|
| https://www.hackaday.com
|
| https://www.tindie.com
| kevinbowman wrote:
| Press release at https://supplyframe.com/press-releases/siemens-
| accelerates-d...
| antattack wrote:
| "for USD 0.7 billion. The transaction unlocks significant value
| for customers of Supplyframe and Siemens, providing seamless and
| quick access to both Siemens' offerings and Supplyframe's
| marketplace intelligence. [...]The acquisition also strengthens
| the Siemens portfolio through Software as a Service (SaaS) "
|
| Software as Service appears to be the ultimate goal.
| prennert wrote:
| It is not not uncommon for enterprise focused and traditionally
| hardware-strong businesses to try to pivot into SaaS as a way
| to bolster their revenue.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Oh no
| antattack wrote:
| Siemens could expand HaD to be like Github for makers.
|
| Maybe even compete with Autodesk by making it easy to use their
| PCB and CAD software on the platform.
|
| And, compete with AWS IoT and other cloud services by offering
| Siemens' own, compatibile with Adafruit modules.
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