[Sketching12] Help me fix Texas Instruments

Tue Jul 24 14:03:37 PDT 2012

Digi, Radio Shack, Intel and many others are definitely interested in the maker/designer/innovator community. Actually I also spent an hour on the phone with State Farm today too, on the topic. Best as I can determine it, these companies are all for real. But that doesn't mean they fully understand us yet. And we need to understand them too. After all it's at least as complicated being an investor-owned multinational enterprise as it is to be a hackerspace.

It sounds like TI is interested in the community part of what we offer. Not sure how much open-hardware matters to them one way or the other. I've met hardly anyone outside of our little circles that have even heard of it. Open software yes; hardware, not so much yet. So I'd doubt there's much fear around it in commercial circles. You gotta know it to fear it. But even then, it's not a very scary thing. Electronics manufacturers have published technical specification and schematics for years, so OSH will be more evolutionary than disruptive. And hey, if it moves product in this economy, anyone who has to do a quarterly earnings call is going to fall down and worship it!

Best of luck Kipp, to you, your presentation and those thirsty penguins.
--Rob

On Jul 24, 2012, at 3:47 PM, Kipp Bradford wrote:

> This is all incredibly helpful, not just for my conversation with TI, but maybe more for creating mutually beneficial strategies for large corporations in general (Radio Shack?).
> 
> I don't think turning around a battleship is possible, and it might not be beneficial in the long run for the OSH community. I'd like to see TI be wildly successful with their battleship, but maybe drop a couple hovercrafts into the water that are well-resourced and serve our needs. I'd be very happy with 1% of a $14B company devoted to open hardware.
> 
> Here's where I make some strange analogy to battleships and torpedo-weilding hovercrafts piloted by desert penguins, but I'm not going to go there.
> 
> Cheers,
> -Kipp
> 
> On Jul 24, 2012, at 3:12 PM, Andrew Fisher wrote:
> 
>> I'll chime in on that one as well as I've hit the same point as CTP I don't have enough time left for "yet-another-whatever" unless it completely addresses a hole in how I'm doing something so I overcome inertia. TI don't seem to deeply engage or interact with the OSH community and see that their interactions need to be based around flogging a particular product. If they took a more engaged stance then sales and product would come as they'd see the issues that actually exist and then design to fill the hole...
>> 
>> Great to meet all of you at my first Sketching as well!!
>> 
>> Cheers
>> Andrew
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Andrew Fisher
>> http://about.me/ajfisher/bio
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 4:36 AM, Christopher T Palmer <ctp at ctpdesign.com> wrote:
>> Not to overstate the obvious (re Alicia's response), but are we not talking about the electronics manufacturing equivalent of asking an oil tanker to do 180 degree U-turn? Is there respect at the corporate level for open source hardware? The whole notion has to give them willies down to their very bones. I know that there are people in these companies who get OSH, but they aren't always (ever?) the people in charge.
>> 
>> For my part I had sent my earlier reply to just Kipp, but I'll share it with everyone here. This is the case for me, and I thought I was the only one until I started hearing this from my colleagues more and more. I don't want to learn yet-another-language, in yet-another-IDE, on yet-another-tool. I simply don't have the time/brainspace/passion for it. I have stuff to do, art to build, students to teach. And when I do learn a new language (even though I really don't want to) it'll be something that takes me in an exciting direction I can't already go - for instance Processing, or MAX/MSP, or some such. I know people who love love love to dig into a new programming language, but I am meeting more and more of us who just don't. 
>> 
>> What I have no idea about is if there's enough people like me to cause a shift, or if there will always be plenty of the other clamoring for the ever new.
>> 
>> CTP
>> 
>> ps - SO AWESOME to see you all in Portland last weekend!
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> At 11:12 AM 7/24/2012, alicia wrote:
>>> Second, they've been very reluctant to admit that the MSP430 Launchpad took any inspiration from Arduino, although some engineers who worked on the product will tell you exactly that, the company as a whole denies it and treats Arduino as a 4 letter word.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 10:35 AM, Kipp Bradford <kb at kippworks.com> wrote:
>>> I have an opportunity this Thursday to tell the TI senior microcontroller folks how to better serve our community. The 900 people in the room will include the Pandaboard folks, BeagleBoard folks, MSP430 team, C2000 team, and more.
>>> 
>>> What would you like to see from TI?
>>> What do they do well for us? What could they do better?
>>> 
>>> Send me an email and I'll incorporate your interests into my talk!
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> -Kipp
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