Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
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.