Quote:
"Radio Shack will soon be going out of business. I can't say that I'm surprised"
"I feel a little mixed about it but they were gouging customers on products that they bought from somewhere else and marking them up exorbitantly."
"..I suppose there are a lot of reasons for it, but some are their own fault, like charging five times what they should for small parts, and going after more consumer-type stuff"
"We still have a chain called Maplin but they are similarly over priced and whilst they were once an electronics shop more of the store is now turned over to PC spares and household items than it used to be."
"I see some (not here, but elsewhere) grumble about Arduino users not really working with electronics, they're just putting modules together.. but I too see that as positive."
We're all talking about this as though it's about progress or poor marketing. Actually, it's just a simple case of individuals (hobbyists or any individual) being excluded by larger businesses. It's pure politics: larger businesses are empowered, we're not, we're no longer invited to the party.
This exists at two main levels. The higher level is the cultural one. We live in a culture that's overwhelmingly consumerist; where people in their day-to-day lives are deskilled because everything is available pre-packaged. Food is a good example, the ratio of prepared meals vs meals cooked from basic ingredients is going up in Western households. And this happens because our expectations are driven by advertising, which is to say: corporates.
There's no reason why we couldn't have a culture that's do-it-yourself friendly, in such a culture that's what industry would revolve around, but in our world, a hobbyist culture has no advertising space, so you can't effectively compete for ideas, for that culture.
The consumerist level explains the arduinoism of electronics. To flash an LED you a $20 arduino package; a breadboard; and a modern 32-bit or 64-bit computer to program the arduino. Oh, and an LED and resistor.
But the same thing is happening to arduinos too. The original arduinos had socketed DIL MCUs, but the new ones have surface mount AVRs. This means that in the old days (i.e. a few years ago) if you burnt out your MCU, you could buy a new one, but in the new days you buy a new arduino. Again this is driven by consumerist thinking: arduino competitors appeared with more performance and this appeals to consumers because they can flash an LED with a 32-bit ARM Cortex now, so the arduino community responds by developing more integrated, profitable boards.
The same thing is true in the Raspberry-PI world. In the old days, the R-PI was a computer. Thanks to 'Kano', you can now build a computer using a Raspberry-PI; which means plugging in a USB cable or two.
The lower level is the 'barrier to entry' level. In various ways, the barrier-to-entry for hobbyists is increasing. That's part of the shift away from raw components at Maplin (do they really only have room for 2 signal diodes in the entire store???) in that someone has to make more of an effort to get past the pre-packaged electronics and only two people can order a diode in a day. It's also how in the way the shift to surface mount technology puts pressure on people to prototype with CAD and their own PCB production, rather than breadboards and stripboard. It's also in the way software development is overwhelmingly centred around complex languages on super-complex development environments with humungous libraries. It all represents barriers to entry.
But the most telling aspect of it is communications protocols! In today's world they're all proprietary, which means that the protocols aren't freely available, you have to pay money to join the club to communicate. And you have to pay money to produce a device which communicates. And all the protocols are high-bandwidth, much higher than a simple hobby device can support. This is true all over:
To talk to a TV, it's HMDI. Want to interface to a peripheral, that's USB. Short-range communications: that's Bluetooth. Storage? That's some form of xyzD-SD card.
This means that in the near future you won't be able to design a simple 6502 SBC which connects to a composite video input, because it will be HDMI. So, you won't be able to output, or input, display, or store information (unless you get hold of an old SD card from ebay and flash wears out doesn't it?). It didn't have to be that way, there's no reason why protocols should be (or can be) 'owned'. It's like someone trying to 'own' the English language and then deciding that how much it costs to speak depends on what we want to say.
We're locked out.
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